Maria Jesus Barros Garcia

Northwestern University | NU · Department of Spanish & Portuguese

The present study sought to evaluate the pragmatic competence of heritage learners of Spanish in regard to compliment sequences and the impact that pragmatic lessons would have on these students. To this end, pre and post tests to assess pragmatic recognition in regard to Spanish compliments were designed by the researchers and completed by the par...

This article presents the results of an analysis conducted on politeness in informal conversations in Peninsular Spanish; more specifically, on the use of compliments in casual Valencian Spanish with face-enhancing effects. Face-enhancing compliments typically have the primary function of constituting and reinforcing the face of the addressee. The...

This paper studies the pragmatic competence of U.S. heritage learners of Spanish in an attempt to determine (a) the degree of pragmatic transfer from English to Spanish experienced by heritage learners when producing different types of requests in Spanish; and (b) how to best teach pragmatics to students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). Add...

As several studies have shown, speakers from different countries, and even speakers from different regions of the same country, ‘vary their speech act production […], convey and perceive politeness differently, and display different interactional patterns during conversational interaction (e.g. greetings, opening and closing sequences, turn-taking,...

The current study reports on three role-plays investigating the understanding and uses of politeness by native speakers of Spanish from Spain, native speakers of English from the United States, and nonnative speakers of Spanish from the United States. Motivated by the different characterization of Peninsular Spanish and U.S. American cultures as so...

The close link between politeness and culture has often been highlighted, with some scholars having proposed taxonomies of cultures based on the diverse uses and conceptions of politeness. Generally, research (Hickey 2005; Ardila 2005) places Spanish-speaking cultures in the group of rapprochement cultures , which relate politeness to positively as...

El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en reflexionar sobre algunos de los rasgos que caracterizan el concepto de cortesía en la cultura española, como es la tendencia hacia la valorización de la imagen de los interlocutores, más que a la mitigación de los peligros para la imagen. A esa valorización de la imagen contribuye la realización de una serie...