Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2007

Abstract

The last decade has seen the publication of many corpus-based studies about Spanish in Catalonia. With an emphasis on the linguistic characteristics that Spanish in Catalonia maintains or has acquired as a result of its prolonged contact with Catalan, these studies have started to catalog the lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax of Spanish in Catalonia. Relatively little attention has been dedicated, however, to the pragmatics of Spanish in Catalonia, that is, to the discourse strategies that constitute Catalan ways of speaking Spanish. The present investigation proceeds in this direction by identifying some of the pragmatic resources employed in Catalan ways of speaking Spanish in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia. Data for this investigation have been transcribed from an oral corpus of twenty hours of informal group conversations in Spanish recorded in 1995 in two naturally-occurring social networks in Barcelona. The digital audio corpus currently awaits web archiving, and a monograph of selected transcripts with a critical introduction to Spanish in the Països Catalans is in preparation. The present investigation uses excerpts from conversations in the corpus described above to discursively illustrate four separate pragmatic resources used in Catalan ways of speaking Spanish in Barcelona. In each case, the investigation then analyzes things that Spanish speakers in Barcelona do through their use of language when they “do Catalan Spanish” via ways of speaking that exploit the pragmatic resources identified.

Comments

Also available from the Cascadilla Proceedings Project

Published Citation

Vann, Robert E. 2007. Doing Catalan Spanish: Pragmatic Resources and Discourse Strategies in Ways of Speaking Spanish in Barcelona. In Selected Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, ed. Jonathan Holmquist, Augusto Lorenzino, and Lotfi Sayahi, 183-192. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

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