This collection of essays on Spanish pragmatics can be understood in its broadest sense in
Iacob L. Mey's words as «the study of the conditions of human language use in a societal
context.» The essays which can be read independently from one another revolve around three
key areas within the Anglo-American school of pragmatics: speech acts conversation and
politeness as sociocultural manifestations of communication. The first part of the book
emphasizes the study of politeness in different Spanish-speaking communities paying special
attention to the realization of polite speech acts and their cross-cultural and
cross-linguistic implications as well as the face-work that interlocutors conduct in casual
conversations and other communicative settings. The second part expands the topic of politeness
strategies to the study of new contexts (such as echo questions and conversational repairs) and
addresses other language phenomena that can be best explored from a pragmalinguistic
perspective such as evidentiality mitigation contrastive emphasis and topicality and
discourse salience. The examples (with the exception of a few literary quotes) proceed from
naturally occurring data or were collected through questionnaires and represent a wide range
of colloquial «Spanishes » from Peninsular to Latin American from monolingual to bilingual
and from native to heritage to second language learners' varieties. The empirical nature of
Aspects of Spanish Pragmatics will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in the use of
Spanish for real-life communicative interactions as well as in the topic of intercultural
communication and the teaching of authentic language to students of Spanish in the United
States.
