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Robert E. Vann
183-192 (complete pdf)
This investigation describes and analyzes conversational data from a spoken language corpus of Catalan Spanish recorded in two social networks in Barcelona (Vann 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003b, in preparation) to illustrate some of the pragmatic resources that may be used in Catalan ways of speaking Spanish in Barcelona. The following four pragmatic resources are considered: bilingual simultaneity (Woolard 1998), speech play (Sherzer 2002), narrative pragmatics (Prince 1983), and conventionalized indirectness (Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989). Analysis of the conversational data reveals that Catalan Spanish speakers in Barcelona can exploit these pragmatic resources as discourse strategies to perform extralinguistic functions through their use of language. 'Doing Catalan Spanish' in this way can serve to construct and express Catalan culture in Spanish language discourse. Depending on discourse participants and audiences, doing Catalan Spanish can lead to the construction of common ground, cultural messages of self and Other, and even cross-cultural messages. The investigation concludes that the Catalan ways of speaking Spanish that exploit such pragmatic resources are constitutive of culture-specific interactional styles that both contribute to and reflect the ethnographic richness of Spanish in the Països Catalans.
Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics
edited by Jonathan Holmquist, Augusto Lorenzino, and Lotfi Sayahi
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-418-8 library binding
viii+192 pages
publication date: 2007
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA