This book, which can be read independently, deals with more specifically linguistic problems in semantics and contains substantial original material.

It is generally assumed in pragmatics that face is essentially a “socially attributed aspect of self”, and that politeness is one kind of facework, alongside other forms of facework such as impoliteness, mock impoliteness, mock politeness, self politeness and so on. In this paper, the assumed necessary link between face and im/politeness is questioned. Drawing from emic studies of face and im/politeness, it is argued that face and im/politeness should be studied, in the first instance, as distinct objects of study (...) in their own right. It is also suggested that drawing from a wider range of emic conceptualisations of face and im/politeness opens up aspects of interpersonal phenomena that have been relatively neglected in pragmatics to date, namely, the importance of relationships as well as the sets of expectancies that underpin evaluations of im/politeness, as distinct areas for theorisation and analysis. It is concluded that while the Goffmanian face paradigm has proven very productive in pragmatics, drawing from various other emic understandings affords further hitherto relatively under-explored analytical opportunities in the study of interpersonal phenomena. (shrink)

The Spanish approximators como and como que serve multiple pragmatic functions. They can be employed in similar contexts to express vagueness when speakers experience uncertainty or to hedge and avoid being straightforward. Furthermore, these forms can alternate according to context since they represent two ways of saying the same thing. This study investigated the use of como and como que in two speech events: narratives of personal experience and therapeutic interviews, which were generated by Spanish speakers of several varieties, educational (...) levels, and lengths of residence in the United States. The study was informed by the theoretical frameworks of sociolinguistic and pragmatic variation, and the data were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings revealed that while como was the preferred form among the speakers of the study they employed como que more often in the therapeutic interviews. Thus, both discourse and the pragmatic functions conditioned the use of these approximators. (shrink)