With the increased use of social media, complimenting behavior online has become a widespread soc... more With the increased use of social media, complimenting behavior online has become a widespread social activity, in response to the posting of photos and other actions. As such, in recent years it has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers in pragmatics. This chapter offers a state-of-the-art overview of compliment and compliment response studies on social media. It starts with a brief consideration of compliment studies in face-to-face interaction, followed by a working definition of compliments. The main bulk of the paper is devoted to examining studies to date of complimenting behavior on social media, highlighting similarities and differences, and emerging trends. Additionally, methodological and ethical issues are discussed in the context of this relatively new area of study. In the final section, directions that future research could take are considered.
This paper examines complimenting behavior among members of one Facebook network of family and fr... more This paper examines complimenting behavior among members of one Facebook network of family and friends in the US. It proposes a way of selecting a corpus for analysis within the online environment under scrutiny and offers a preliminary characterization of Facebook compliments in American English in relation to the form compliments take, common objects of complimenting and the key function(s) that they perform. As part of a multimodal system of communication, compliments on Facebook are described as a kind of second-pair part of photo-initiated communication online that can be employed to reaffirm the relationship and strengthen the bonds between the interactants. The paper also explores the extent to which complimenting behavior on Facebook resembles usage that has been described for American English in face-to-face interaction. It shows that complimenting behavior on Facebook is the same in some ways but also different. The differences identified appear to be mainly related to the medium of interaction and the affordances (and restrictions) of the technology that can give rise to variations of talk or perhaps even new social practices.
This chapter provides an overview of research on speech acts in Spanish in the past 15 years. It ... more This chapter provides an overview of research on speech acts in Spanish in the past 15 years. It starts with a brief presentation of the key tenets of Speech Act Theory as conceived by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1975, 1976), followed by a consideration of the limitations of the theory from a pragmatics perspective. In the second part, an indicative overview of speech acts research in Spanish is offered, with a focus on sociopragmatics, pragmalinguistics, cross-linguistic/cultural, and variational pragmatics studies. General trends are first outlined along various classificatory dimensions, followed by a consideration of studies according to Searle’s (1976) illocutionary acts taxonomy. The chapter concludes with reflections on future research prospects in this vibrant area
Compliment responses in face-to-face interaction have been extensively studied in different langu... more Compliment responses in face-to-face interaction have been extensively studied in different languages and cultures. Studies on complimenting behaviour in social-digital contexts are beginning to emerge (cf. Cirillo 2012; Placencia and Lower 2013; Maíz-Arévalo 2013). This paper aims to contribute to this emerging body of work by examining the responses to compliments made on Facebook (FB) by a group of women within an FB network in the US. While they received 1057 compliments, they produced only 205 responses. These results contrast with findings for face-to-face interactions, where non-response is exceptional, suggesting a strong influence of the medium on social norms. Regarding compliments which were responded to, acceptance predominated over rejection, in line with previous work within English-speaking communities (cf. Holmes 1986). Supplementary data from interviews with a group of American FB users revealed that their expectations are, overall, different from face-to-face inter...
As we saw in Chapter 1, pragmatics is a relatively new discipline whose nature of inquiry interse... more As we saw in Chapter 1, pragmatics is a relatively new discipline whose nature of inquiry intersects with that of a number of other social sciences, such as linguistics (applied linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, semantics, sociolinguistics), sociology, psychology and anthropology. Pragmatics does not have a methodology of its own but draws upon the methodology employed in other social sciences, in linguistics, anthropology and sociology, for example. As the field of pragmatics is broad and covers a variety of strands, from the study of (contextualized) sentence meaning (Fraser, 1998) to the study of meaning in interaction (Thomas, 1995), the way in which data are collected and analysed depends on the pragmatic perspective adopted by the researcher, as well as on the object of study. This book has focused on sociopragmatics; namely, on the study of the underlying norms of speaker and hearer meaning as reflected in the (appropriate) realization of speech acts, the organization of conversation, politeness manifestations and sociopragmatic variation. Furthermore, most of the empirical studies discussed in the book have concentrated on different aspects of ‘spoken interaction’, gathered in a variety of ways: from the employment of production questionnaires, aimed at eliciting instances of spoken data, to the use of naturalistic data collection methods. Rather than provide a precis on social research, the aim of this chapter is to review the main data collection methods that have been employed to study different aspects of (Spanish) sociopragmatics. This decision has been taken for two reasons: firstly, there is already available an array of specialized publications on the subject of social research and, secondly, as evidenced by the empirical studies reported in previous chapters, sociopragmaticists have favoured some social research instruments more than others, for example, questionnaires v. interviews.
The last twenty to thirty years have seen a proliferation of studies in linguistic politeness (Ka... more The last twenty to thirty years have seen a proliferation of studies in linguistic politeness (Kasper, 1996). The increasing interest in this area has led some scholars to see politeness as a sub-discipline of pragmatics (Thomas, 1995).
Within the past three decades, different definitions of pragmatics have been proposed (Bar-Hillel... more Within the past three decades, different definitions of pragmatics have been proposed (Bar-Hillel, 1971; Haberland and Mey, 1977, 2002; Kasher, 1977; Dascal, 1983; Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983; Mey, 1985, 1998; Biletzki, 1996). These reflect not just the different ...
Based on a corpus of 145 interactions (290 individual posts), selected at random from these two d... more Based on a corpus of 145 interactions (290 individual posts), selected at random from these two domains, it focuses on the realization of two core elements of the transaction: openings and closings. In addition, it looks at how both vendors and buyers employ forms of address as a resource for interpersonal communication. Overall, there were more similarities than differences in the behavior patterns of users across the two domains. For example, all users overwhelmingly favored informal address. However, some clear distinctions between buyers and vendors could be discerned, particularly, how each user group structured their posts: buyers were far less restricted by formal convention than vendors, often omitting greetings and/or leave-takings. Some data, nonetheless, display that users are unsure of how to approach their online interactions as they use a mixture of politeness strategies.
Introduction to special issue of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (2018) entitled ... more Introduction to special issue of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (2018) entitled 'Closeness and Conflict: The discourse of domestic discord across English and Spanish-speaking communities
This study explores how middle-class Quiteños respond to certain convivial directives among famil... more This study explores how middle-class Quiteños respond to certain convivial directives among family and friends that they are unable or unwilling to comply with. It examines some of the strategies which Quiteños employ to deal with the tensions that can arise from two conflicting forces: social pressure and individual wants. Close ties among family members and intimate friends often make refusals to certain directives difficult, so that people feel obliged to comply because of el compromiso (social) (i.e., the obligation that relations of kin or friendship impose). On the other hand, when there is less closeness, token acceptances and avoidance strategies may be employed for face-saving purposes. Both sets of behavior (compliance and non-compliance) are interpreted in terms of the underlying interpersonal ideology of connectedness (Fitch 1998) that seems to operate in Quiteño society. Within this ideology, relationships can take precedence over the individual's o .wn desires; if ...
ELUA. Estudios de Lingüística Universidad de Alicante, 2004
This paper offers a contrastive analysis of the "rapport management" strategies (cfr. S... more This paper offers a contrastive analysis of the "rapport management" strategies (cfr. Spencer-Oatey, 2000) employed by pharmacists and their costumers in interactions in pharmacies in Seville and London. The behaviour of Sevillians and Londoners was found to vary along five main dimensions or "socio-pragmatics interactional principies" (cfr. Spencer-Oatey and Jiang, 2003): (1) formality vs. informality, (2) consensus vs. self-affirmation, (3) dyadic vs. gregarious / public communication, (4) restraint vs. talkativeness, and (5) directness vs. indirectness in the formulation of the transation. Also following Spencer-Oatey (in press), the paper attempts to explain the motivations behind the preferences exhibited by bouth groups, with particular reference to considerations of "face", the goals that the interactants pursue, and their rights and obligations in relation to the type of activity that they are engaged in.
Vamos con todois a mixed-genre entertainment programme transmitted in Ecuador on a national telev... more Vamos con todois a mixed-genre entertainment programme transmitted in Ecuador on a national television channel. The segment of the programme that we examine in this paper focuses on gossip and events surrounding local/national celebrities. Talk as entertainment is central to this segment which is structured around a series of ‘news’ stories announced by the presenters and mostly conveyed through (pre-recorded) interviews. Extracts of these interviews are ingeniously presented to create a sense of confrontation between the celebrities concerned. Each news story is then followed-up by informal ‘discussions’ among the show’s 5-6 presenters who take on the role of panellists. WhileVamos con todoincorporates various genres, the running thread throughout the programme is the creation of scandal and the instigation of confrontation. What is of particular interest, however, is that no sooner the scandalous stories are presented, the programme presenters attempt to defuse the scandal and con...
Información del artículo Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al púb... more Información del artículo Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al público: El caso de una institución pública ecuatoriana. ... Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al público: El caso de una institución pública ecuatoriana. ...
With the increased use of social media, complimenting behavior online has become a widespread soc... more With the increased use of social media, complimenting behavior online has become a widespread social activity, in response to the posting of photos and other actions. As such, in recent years it has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers in pragmatics. This chapter offers a state-of-the-art overview of compliment and compliment response studies on social media. It starts with a brief consideration of compliment studies in face-to-face interaction, followed by a working definition of compliments. The main bulk of the paper is devoted to examining studies to date of complimenting behavior on social media, highlighting similarities and differences, and emerging trends. Additionally, methodological and ethical issues are discussed in the context of this relatively new area of study. In the final section, directions that future research could take are considered.
This paper examines complimenting behavior among members of one Facebook network of family and fr... more This paper examines complimenting behavior among members of one Facebook network of family and friends in the US. It proposes a way of selecting a corpus for analysis within the online environment under scrutiny and offers a preliminary characterization of Facebook compliments in American English in relation to the form compliments take, common objects of complimenting and the key function(s) that they perform. As part of a multimodal system of communication, compliments on Facebook are described as a kind of second-pair part of photo-initiated communication online that can be employed to reaffirm the relationship and strengthen the bonds between the interactants. The paper also explores the extent to which complimenting behavior on Facebook resembles usage that has been described for American English in face-to-face interaction. It shows that complimenting behavior on Facebook is the same in some ways but also different. The differences identified appear to be mainly related to the medium of interaction and the affordances (and restrictions) of the technology that can give rise to variations of talk or perhaps even new social practices.
This chapter provides an overview of research on speech acts in Spanish in the past 15 years. It ... more This chapter provides an overview of research on speech acts in Spanish in the past 15 years. It starts with a brief presentation of the key tenets of Speech Act Theory as conceived by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1975, 1976), followed by a consideration of the limitations of the theory from a pragmatics perspective. In the second part, an indicative overview of speech acts research in Spanish is offered, with a focus on sociopragmatics, pragmalinguistics, cross-linguistic/cultural, and variational pragmatics studies. General trends are first outlined along various classificatory dimensions, followed by a consideration of studies according to Searle’s (1976) illocutionary acts taxonomy. The chapter concludes with reflections on future research prospects in this vibrant area
Compliment responses in face-to-face interaction have been extensively studied in different langu... more Compliment responses in face-to-face interaction have been extensively studied in different languages and cultures. Studies on complimenting behaviour in social-digital contexts are beginning to emerge (cf. Cirillo 2012; Placencia and Lower 2013; Maíz-Arévalo 2013). This paper aims to contribute to this emerging body of work by examining the responses to compliments made on Facebook (FB) by a group of women within an FB network in the US. While they received 1057 compliments, they produced only 205 responses. These results contrast with findings for face-to-face interactions, where non-response is exceptional, suggesting a strong influence of the medium on social norms. Regarding compliments which were responded to, acceptance predominated over rejection, in line with previous work within English-speaking communities (cf. Holmes 1986). Supplementary data from interviews with a group of American FB users revealed that their expectations are, overall, different from face-to-face inter...
As we saw in Chapter 1, pragmatics is a relatively new discipline whose nature of inquiry interse... more As we saw in Chapter 1, pragmatics is a relatively new discipline whose nature of inquiry intersects with that of a number of other social sciences, such as linguistics (applied linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, semantics, sociolinguistics), sociology, psychology and anthropology. Pragmatics does not have a methodology of its own but draws upon the methodology employed in other social sciences, in linguistics, anthropology and sociology, for example. As the field of pragmatics is broad and covers a variety of strands, from the study of (contextualized) sentence meaning (Fraser, 1998) to the study of meaning in interaction (Thomas, 1995), the way in which data are collected and analysed depends on the pragmatic perspective adopted by the researcher, as well as on the object of study. This book has focused on sociopragmatics; namely, on the study of the underlying norms of speaker and hearer meaning as reflected in the (appropriate) realization of speech acts, the organization of conversation, politeness manifestations and sociopragmatic variation. Furthermore, most of the empirical studies discussed in the book have concentrated on different aspects of ‘spoken interaction’, gathered in a variety of ways: from the employment of production questionnaires, aimed at eliciting instances of spoken data, to the use of naturalistic data collection methods. Rather than provide a precis on social research, the aim of this chapter is to review the main data collection methods that have been employed to study different aspects of (Spanish) sociopragmatics. This decision has been taken for two reasons: firstly, there is already available an array of specialized publications on the subject of social research and, secondly, as evidenced by the empirical studies reported in previous chapters, sociopragmaticists have favoured some social research instruments more than others, for example, questionnaires v. interviews.
The last twenty to thirty years have seen a proliferation of studies in linguistic politeness (Ka... more The last twenty to thirty years have seen a proliferation of studies in linguistic politeness (Kasper, 1996). The increasing interest in this area has led some scholars to see politeness as a sub-discipline of pragmatics (Thomas, 1995).
Within the past three decades, different definitions of pragmatics have been proposed (Bar-Hillel... more Within the past three decades, different definitions of pragmatics have been proposed (Bar-Hillel, 1971; Haberland and Mey, 1977, 2002; Kasher, 1977; Dascal, 1983; Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983; Mey, 1985, 1998; Biletzki, 1996). These reflect not just the different ...
Based on a corpus of 145 interactions (290 individual posts), selected at random from these two d... more Based on a corpus of 145 interactions (290 individual posts), selected at random from these two domains, it focuses on the realization of two core elements of the transaction: openings and closings. In addition, it looks at how both vendors and buyers employ forms of address as a resource for interpersonal communication. Overall, there were more similarities than differences in the behavior patterns of users across the two domains. For example, all users overwhelmingly favored informal address. However, some clear distinctions between buyers and vendors could be discerned, particularly, how each user group structured their posts: buyers were far less restricted by formal convention than vendors, often omitting greetings and/or leave-takings. Some data, nonetheless, display that users are unsure of how to approach their online interactions as they use a mixture of politeness strategies.
Introduction to special issue of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (2018) entitled ... more Introduction to special issue of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (2018) entitled 'Closeness and Conflict: The discourse of domestic discord across English and Spanish-speaking communities
This study explores how middle-class Quiteños respond to certain convivial directives among famil... more This study explores how middle-class Quiteños respond to certain convivial directives among family and friends that they are unable or unwilling to comply with. It examines some of the strategies which Quiteños employ to deal with the tensions that can arise from two conflicting forces: social pressure and individual wants. Close ties among family members and intimate friends often make refusals to certain directives difficult, so that people feel obliged to comply because of el compromiso (social) (i.e., the obligation that relations of kin or friendship impose). On the other hand, when there is less closeness, token acceptances and avoidance strategies may be employed for face-saving purposes. Both sets of behavior (compliance and non-compliance) are interpreted in terms of the underlying interpersonal ideology of connectedness (Fitch 1998) that seems to operate in Quiteño society. Within this ideology, relationships can take precedence over the individual's o .wn desires; if ...
ELUA. Estudios de Lingüística Universidad de Alicante, 2004
This paper offers a contrastive analysis of the "rapport management" strategies (cfr. S... more This paper offers a contrastive analysis of the "rapport management" strategies (cfr. Spencer-Oatey, 2000) employed by pharmacists and their costumers in interactions in pharmacies in Seville and London. The behaviour of Sevillians and Londoners was found to vary along five main dimensions or "socio-pragmatics interactional principies" (cfr. Spencer-Oatey and Jiang, 2003): (1) formality vs. informality, (2) consensus vs. self-affirmation, (3) dyadic vs. gregarious / public communication, (4) restraint vs. talkativeness, and (5) directness vs. indirectness in the formulation of the transation. Also following Spencer-Oatey (in press), the paper attempts to explain the motivations behind the preferences exhibited by bouth groups, with particular reference to considerations of "face", the goals that the interactants pursue, and their rights and obligations in relation to the type of activity that they are engaged in.
Vamos con todois a mixed-genre entertainment programme transmitted in Ecuador on a national telev... more Vamos con todois a mixed-genre entertainment programme transmitted in Ecuador on a national television channel. The segment of the programme that we examine in this paper focuses on gossip and events surrounding local/national celebrities. Talk as entertainment is central to this segment which is structured around a series of ‘news’ stories announced by the presenters and mostly conveyed through (pre-recorded) interviews. Extracts of these interviews are ingeniously presented to create a sense of confrontation between the celebrities concerned. Each news story is then followed-up by informal ‘discussions’ among the show’s 5-6 presenters who take on the role of panellists. WhileVamos con todoincorporates various genres, the running thread throughout the programme is the creation of scandal and the instigation of confrontation. What is of particular interest, however, is that no sooner the scandalous stories are presented, the programme presenters attempt to defuse the scandal and con...
Información del artículo Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al púb... more Información del artículo Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al público: El caso de una institución pública ecuatoriana. ... Percepciones y manifestaciones de la (des)cortesía en la atención al público: El caso de una institución pública ecuatoriana. ...
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