María Elena Placencia/Carmen García (eds.): Research on ...

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<strong>María</strong> <strong>Elena</strong> <strong>Placencia</strong>/<strong>Carmen</strong> <strong>García</strong>
(<strong>eds</strong>.): <strong>Research</strong> on Politeness in the
Spanish-Speaking World. Mahwah,
NJ/London: Lawrence Erlbaum 2007.
442 páginas. ISBN 0-8058-5227-1.
In <strong>Research</strong> on politeness in the Spanish-speaking
world (2007), <strong>María</strong> <strong>Elena</strong>
<strong>Placencia</strong> and <strong>Carmen</strong> <strong>García</strong> have compiled
a volume, divided into a preface, an
introduction, and four parts, that surveys
existing research and advances knowledge
in the field of pragmatics.
In the preface, the editors describe
how the recent surge in research on Hispanic
pragmatics inspired this volume. In
the introduction, they highlight that in
recent years pragmatics has seen research
on previously understudied varieties of
Spanish. Some of this research inspired
debate among Hispanists on the universality
of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework
and the need for alternative proposals.
<strong>Placencia</strong> and <strong>García</strong> also review
twelve frameworks used by Hispanists to
study politeness highlighting their
strengths and limitations. Since, despite
recent advancements, pragmatics still
lacks a completely problem-free model to
study (im)politeness, some of these frameworks
are intended to supplement Brown
and Levinson’s.
Part I (Overviews of politeness studies)
includes six chapters dealing with
research on Peninsular Spanish and nine
varieties of the Spanish of the Americas.
In Chapter 1 Silvia Iglesias Recuero
reviews existing work on politeness in
Peninsular Spanish focusing on studies
evaluating the universal applicability of
Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model. The
author feels that recent literature on politeness
in the Spanish-speaking world
reflects the need to revise the idea of a
universal system of politeness and to formulate
new theoretical hypotheses to bet-
ter account for the phenomena examined
including sociocultural variation.
Chapter 2 by Laura Alba-Juez complements
the previous chapter by reviewing
the most important contributions to
politeness research on Argentinean and
Uruguayan Spanish. She examines theoretical
and empirical work on topics ranging
from forms of address to (im)politeness
in online chats (Argentina) and from
piropos to service encounters (Uruguay).
This work highlights a tendency common
to both Argentinean and Uruguayan Spanish:
the preference for solidarity and/or
affiliation politeness strategies reflected in
a number of studies on both varieties. In
Chapter 3 <strong>María</strong> <strong>Elena</strong> <strong>Placencia</strong> surveys
politeness research in Colombian, Ecuadorian
and Peruvian Spanish spanning several
decades and focusing on politeness
devices, address forms and speech acts.
Given the different sub-varieties of Spanish
in these countries, <strong>Placencia</strong> reviews
politeness studies based on a number of
topics within each national variety and
highlights commonalities without neglecting
the variation existing within each
country. In Chapter 4 <strong>Carmen</strong> <strong>García</strong>
reviews recent politeness studies on
Venezuelan and Cuban Spanish exploring
topics that include speech act realizations,
making and declining invitations, requesting
a service, reprimanding, responding to
a reprimand, and political discourse. <strong>García</strong>
concludes that Venezuelans and
Cubans, who seem to belong to positive
politeness cultures, tend to establish solidarity
with their interlocutors.
Chapters 5 and 6 address politeness in
Mexico and the United States respectively.
In the former, <strong>Carmen</strong> Curcó describes
the concern with safeguarding the positive
face of an interlocutor which she sees as
pervading Mexican verbal interaction.
She addresses topics including apologies,
simulated negotiations, strategic pronomi-
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nal address, and refusals, with an interest
in speech acts that threaten the speaker’s
positive face. In the latter, Cashman
reviews classic and recent work on speech
acts in U.S. Spanish. She examines articles
on politeness in institutional contexts
including the classroom, the media and
the law (situations in legal settings involving
interpreters), focusing on social evaluation
of varieties of U.S. Spanish, language
maintenance and shift. Cashman
indicates that requests constitute the most
studied speech act in U.S. Spanish with
continuing interest in interactions involving
speakers with varying degrees of
bilingualism. She also notes that after
three decades of research, linguistic politeness
in U.S. Spanish (especially among
groups others than Mexican Americans)
remains underexplored. The most influential
framework in the studies in Part I is
that of Brown and Levinson’s (1978,
1987). Several authors report on empirical
research revealing that Brown and Levinson’s
politeness model is too Anglocentric
to apply universally. The works in Part I
invariably indicate that much research is
still needed for which Cashman (Chapter
6) provides the most comprehensive set of
directions.
Part II (Empirical studies of politeness)
constitutes the bulk of the volume.
In this part, divided into three sections,
there is a shift from overview articles to
empirical studies. Section A includes four
chapters discussing politeness in different
institutional contexts. The first (Chapter
7), written by Nuria Lorenzo-Dus examines
(im)politeness in a Spanish live participation
TVshow examining footage
which encourages verbal conflict. Confrontation
talk is explored at the discourse
level viewing Spain as a positive politeness
culture with less sensitivity toward
intrusion upon interactans’ face ne<strong>eds</strong>.
The findings show relatively infrequent
but clear examples of impoliteness where
participants perceive that their private
faces have been deliberately and maximally
threatened.
In Chapter 8, Isolda Carranza explores
impoliteness in criminal trials in Argentina
finding that members of the court or legal
professionals use impolite verbal behavior
against some witnesses. The concept of
face does not sufficiently account for the
recurrent offensive behavior toward subordinate
participants. The author stresses the
need to go beyond a purely interactional
analysis at the local level maintaining that
studies of impoliteness must incorporate
social field, society at large, and the effect
of ideologies. Carranza advocates that a
comprehensive theory of discourse such as
Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s (1999) can
account for verbal behavior regarding
politeness issues in institutional settings.
She claims that although the job has not
been completed, the necessary conceptual
tools have been identified.
Chapter 9 presents Marisa Cordella’s
analyses of face-threatening acts in medical
consultation settings in Santiago,
Chile. She explores the linguistic strategies
doctors use to check on patients’
compliance and responses examining the
discourse sequences which develop
around the issues raised while exploring
the relation between discourse, society
and culture. The results appear to contradict
previous findings on interactional rituals
(Goffman 1967). Cordella shows that
face may be compromised if patients present
noncomplying behaviors, prompting
reprimands or further education from doctors.
Apparently, in medical consultations,
the benefits associated with challenging
the physician’s or patient’s face sometimes
outweigh the temporary loss of face
of one or the other.
Section A of Part II concludes with
Chapter 10 where <strong>Elena</strong> Ruzickova

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explores requests during service encounters
in Havana, Cuba. The author uses
Blum-Kulka and House’s (1989) typology
of request types to analyze a variety of
customer requests in different contexts
including a bus station, a post office, a
library and a pizza stand. Her corpus
includes both male and female participants
of all ages, socioeconomic groups,
educational levels, and regional and ethnic
backgrounds. Ruzickova’s results provide
quantitative support to previous studies
showing that Latin Americans would
rather maintain positive face than protect
their freedom of action. She concludes
that the content of face and face work
should be defined within the values and
expectations of each culture.
Section (B) of Part II consists of two
chapters. In Chapter 11 Kristine Fitch discusses
how Colombian patterns of language
use develop within cultural contexts
of meaning. Using ethnographic
data from the Bogotá metropolitan area,
Fitch describes the cultural system of
meaning underlying the use of terms for
directives, address and reference, and
symbolic narratives of accomplishment.
She asserts that interpersonal relationships
are developed and maintained based
on an all-encompassing ideology of connectedness
that produces two dilemmas:
one between sincerity and appropriateness,
the other between confianza (a relationship-specific
degree of trust and
closeness) and jerarquía (social structure).
Fitch concludes that although this
ideology of connectedness may exist
beyond the Spanish-speaking world, in
Colombia it is all-encompassing, framing
all interaction.
The second article in Section B,
(Chapter 12) by <strong>Carmen</strong> <strong>García</strong>, studies
young Argentineans’ interactional patterns
when issuing invitations. Using Brown
and Levinson’s (1987) and Blum-Kulka,
House and Kasper (1989) frameworks,
<strong>García</strong> divided interactions into three
stages: invitation-response, insistenceresponse,
and wrap-up. She concludes that
invitations within this cultural context are
seen as face-enhancing acts requiring a
deferential tone from the speaker. However,
Argentineans, regardless of sex,
expressed solidarity to a much greater
extent than deference, and extensively
imposed on both themselves and the interlocutor
especially when responding to a
refusal. They also preferred protecting
their likeability over their freedom of
action, reflecting their desire for maintaining
camaraderie and strengthening the
bonds between themselves and the interlocutor.
Section (C) of Part II concludes with
one article (Chapter 13) dealing with
silence and politeness in Zapotec and
Spanish. Its author, Martina Schrader-
Kniffki, analyzes politeness forms related
to silence as a communicative act in a
southern Mexico bilingual Zapotec-Spanish
community. She asserts that in Zapotec
communities both talk and silence are
essential expressions of politeness with
specific rules regarding their presence,
absence, and length. Despite some politeness
conventions shared by Zapotec and
Spanish speakers, politeness rules are violated
in intercultural encounters, forcing
silence on the Zapotec speakers. Silence
also functions as a conflict management
strategy since Zapotecs use it to politely
refuse requests. Schrader-Kniffki concludes
that silence and politeness are variable
regarding form, function, and time.
The study shows that intercultural contact
may trigger changes within culture-specific
systems.
Part III consist of one article by Lars
Fant (Chaper 14) that offers theoretical
proposals to examine rapport and identity
management. Using sequences of data
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from face-to-face interaction among
native speakers of Peninsular and Chilean
Spanish, the author applies a dialogistic
approach to explore the integration of different
varieties and elaborations of politeness
theory with theories of social identity.
Fant’s analyses are based on concepts
such as face, agenda, and membership.
He suggests a set of cross-classifying
parameters to systematically describe
rapport and identity management which
includes, among others, face orientation
versus agenda orientation, and targetaddressing
versus target-avoiding action.
Fant’s observations only justify tentative
hypotheses regarding the types of action
studied. He hopes that concrete examples
would help show how rapport and identity
management occur in spontaneous
interaction oriented toward dialogical
principles.
Part IV (Conclusions) consists of a
mainly reflexive chapter (15) written by
the editors. Based on the overviews presented
in Part I, they synthesize the main
trends in politeness research on the Spanish-speaking
world. The discussion of theoretical
studies precedes that of empirical
ones. <strong>Placencia</strong> and <strong>García</strong> also emphasize
that, given the limited research available
in relation to different domains, one
must still be cautious about claiming positive
or negative politeness orientations or
particular contents of affiliation or autonomy
for entire societies since, e.g., neither
all Spaniards nor all Mexicans follow
identical norms of interaction. A lengthy
reference section follows this chapter (692
works over 42 pages). Besides reflecting
how well documented the studies in this
volume are, it constitutes a working bibliography
containing the most relevant
work on politeness in the Spanish-speaking
world.
This fascinating, well-written volume
provides a clear glimpse at the state of the
art in pragmatics/politeness research at the
turn of the third millennium. One of its
central messages, a recurrent theme
throughout this volume, is that despite the
recent surge in research on Hispanic pragmatics,
there is a vast universe still unexplored.
This call for further research
echoes others in recent pragmatics volumes
(e.g. Reyes 2002, Schrader-Kniffki
2006). The suggestions for further
research span from the study of greater
variety of speech acts, and social and
regional variation to a more nuanced
study of gender, and from the use/combination
of a variety of data collection procedures,
to the use of new technologies
and the exploration of new frameworks.
Several authors in this volume emphasize
that such research would help support or
reject the findings obtained to date besides
facilitating the proposal of more definite
trends.
This volume offers a comprehensive
overview of pragmatic studies on a dozen
varieties of Spanish including some still
understudied. It fits harmoniously with
the existing literature and provides a point
of departure and a solid foundation to
newcomers while serving as a reference
manual to seasoned scholars. This work
not only reflects current issues and trends,
but also encourages critical debate on
desiderata, possible innovations, and new
directions for theoretical and empirical
research. This volume constitutes a noteworthy
contribution to the literature on
pragmatics/politeness whose value and
usefulness reaches beyond the Spanishspeaking
world.
References
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana/House, Juliane (1989):
“Cross-cultural and situational variation
in requesting behavior,” in: Blum-Kulka,

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Shoshana/House, Juliane/Kasper, Gabriele
(<strong>eds</strong>.), 123-154.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana/House, Juliane/Kasper,
Gabriele (<strong>eds</strong>.) (1989): Cross-cultural
pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex.
Brown, Penelope/Levinson, Stephen (1978):
“Universals in language usage: Politeness
phenomena,” in: Goody, Esther (ed.):
Questions and politeness: Strategies in
social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 56-324.
— (1987): Politeness: Some universals in
language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Chouliaraki, Lilie/Fairclough, Norman (1999):
Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking
critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Goffman, Erving (1967): Interaction ritual:
Essays on face-to-face behavior. Garden
City, NY: Anchor Books.
Reyes, Graciela (2002): Metapragmática:
Lenguaje sobre lenguaje, ficciones, figuras.
Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.
Schrader-Kniffki, Martina (ed.) (2006): La
cortesía en el mundo hispánico: Nuevos
contextos, nuevos enfoques metodológicos.
Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/
Vervuert.
Rafael Orozco
Louisiana State University
Aldina Quintana Rodríguez: Geografía
lingüística del judeoespañol. Bern: Peter
Lang 2006. 546 páginas. ISBN 3-03910-
846-8.
Con la publicación de este libro, Aldina
Quintana nos ofrece una obra útil y
valiosa para el estudio del judeoespañol o
ladino, el español hablado por los sefardíes
del Imperio Otomano, territorio que corresponde
hoy en día los países situados en la
Península de los Balcanes, Turquía, Israel
y Egipto. Para ello, la lingüista se decanta
por el método de la geografía lingüística.
Abordar el estudio del judeoespañol
desde la perspectiva de la geolingüística
constituye ya de por sí un gran acierto. En
efecto, por lo que respecta a la variación
diatópica, el judeoespañol cuenta con
varios estudios monográficos –sobre todo
de la primera mitad del siglo pasado–,
centrados en descripciones parciales, bien
dedicados a una variedad en particular,
bien a ciertos fenómenos lingüísticos del
ladino; otros tantos pueden inscribirse
dentro de una tradición más bien dialectológica.
Sin embargo, no contaba hasta
ahora con la publicación de un estudio
general sobre la variación diatópica 1 . Precisamente
la geografía lingüística, a partir
de la selección de determinadas variantes
y su plasmación en mapas,
además de permitir la observación de
carácter general acerca del funcionamiento
del lenguaje como medio de intercomunicación
social, revela[n] la conexión
entre la historia lingüística y los factores
geográficos o geopolíticos, pues ofrece[n]
la posibilidad de comprobar que las innovaciones
en las lenguas proceden de ciertos
centros y que su difusión se detiene en
ciertos límites constituidos por ríos, montañas,
fronteras políticas, administrativas
o eclesiásticas (Quintana 2006: 15).
1 En realidad, puede considerarse a David M.
Bunis como el verdadero precursor de los estudios
de geografía lingüística judeoespañola. El
eminente lingüista llevó a cabo un primer estudio
con mapas en “Toward a linguistic geography
of Judeszmo” (1973), hasta hoy sin
publicar. A éste le siguió otro, “Toward a linguistic
and cultural geography of Judezmo”
(1975), tampoco publicado. Cf también Quintana
2006: 11.
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