Politeness and prosody in conversational Spanish in San Antonio, Texas

Abstract

In this paper our aim is to consider verbal interaction from the politeness Theory as a field of study within Pragmatics and oral Discourse Analysis. We review, firstly, the theoretical background that represents the starting point of this study. This theoretical framework is based mainly on general issues around basic concepts in relation to politeness from the main contributions of linguistics to its characterization. We then focus on the model developed by Brown and Levinson in which the concept of image (face) is crucial. The theoretical framework has allowed us to provide verbal expressions of politeness and analyze them prosodically in order to see whether they are correlated with specific and systematic prosodic procedures. The examples discussed are drawn from conversations with English speakers born in San Antonio Texas, with a medium-high cultural level, whose knowledge of the Spanish language is mainly acquired by language contact or studying the Spanish language. The concept of interculturality plays a fundamental role in these informants, because of the geographical land border of San Antonio Texas with Mexico, as well as the Mexican population in that city and its surroundings. The work is presented as an exploratory study in order to provide later more specific studies with a specific corpus, that will allow us to draw meaningful conclusions concerning the relationship between prosody and verbal politeness.

Keywords: verbal politeness, prosody, interculturality.