(Im)politeness in Spanish-speaking socio-cultural contexts

Abstract

The papers collected for this special issue of Pragmatics continue the discussion on the phenomena of politeness in Spanish, initiated and sustained within EDICE Programme (Estudios del Discurso de la Cortesía en Español, 'Studies on the Discourse of Politeness in Spanish') 1 .The purpose of this collection is to provide recent research on politeness in and about Spanish to the international academic community.To meet these objectives, each paper in English is preceded by a summary written in Spanish.Previous work published within EDICE Programme has focused on the relation between the interpretation of politeness and socio-cultural and situational contexts.Those publications have adopted a critical perspective towards the universalism present in the theoretical framework put forward by Brown andLevinson ([1978] 1987).Bravo (2004) discusses the tension between universalism and cultural relativism observed in the traditional theories of politeness, highlighting the importance of incorporating an extralinguistic element in the analysis.In that paper, the author argues that the study of politeness should proceed through a methodology that takes into account conditions of both dependence and independence to socio-cultural factors.As Bravo (op.cit.) explains, it is necessary to consider two types of contexts to interpret "activities of politeness".First, the "co-textual" context, which includes networks of meaning created by those communicative resources associated to the expressions under analysis, the conditions of the exchange, the thematic progressions and even the discursive dynamics of the interlocution.Second, the "extralinguistic" and "extra-textual" context, which may be internal to the communicative situation (such as, for example, the activity of drinking coffee accomplished together by participants of a social encounter, and even the disposition of furniture in the location for that encounter) or external to it (such as the social characteristics of the interlocutors, their beliefs, worldviews, and behavioural expectations).In this volume, the author summarises her methodological proposal 2 , presents papers that follow the same methodology, and puts forward other authors with related methodological designs.1 EDICE Programme aims at bringing together scholars from Spanish departments and research centers located both in Spanish-speaking countries and outside the Spanish-speaking world.EDICE Programme's main objectives are (1) to study polite behavior in Spanish, (2) to account for the various socio-cultural contexts underlying that behavior, (3) to carry out contrastive analyses between Spanish and other European languages, as well as between different varieties of Spanish, (4) to study differences in polite behaviors in relation to more general and permanent social roles adopted by participants in interaction, (5) to study differences in polite behavior emerging from situational roles played by the participants and which depend on the kind of social activity they are engaged in, (6) to contribute to the development of theoretical models in the research area.2 See also Bravo (1999).

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