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The aim of this paper is to ascertain the attitudes English native speakers have towards the Spanish language and culture, specifically, in relation to the speech act of thanking and in connection with Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness ([1978] 1987). Two sources of data were used: First, a corpus of 64 course books which included 250 situations representing the speech act of thanking and, second, a questionnaire for the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language. The situations including the speech act of thanking were analysed and then categorized according to various criteria. The criteria were created by taking into consideration Coulmas’ (1981) proposal for the classification of thanking as well as the components of this specific speech act. The most frequent situations found in the course books were then used to devise the second source of data. The aim of this was to determine the attitudes of 300 participants, divided equally between the nationalities used in the investigation, Spanish, British and American. The questionnaire included 12 scenarios in which the thanking formula was omitted. Participants were prompted to answer questions based on their perceptions and to include other responses whenever they considered them to be appropriate. The main findings provided evidence of different facework values across the three groups of informants for some of the specific scenarios. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of data showed that some of the responses were connected to the thanking formulae, but others to speech acts such as request formulae.

AbstractThe main aim of the study is to ascertain contrastively, in English and Spanish, how directive speech acts are represented in film discourse. For the purpose of the investigation, the directive speech acts of 24 films, 12 in English and 12 in Spanish, were extracted and analysed. A classification taxonomy, inspired by previous research, was created in order to categorize the different types of directive speech acts and determine their level of (in)directness. The results show that indirectness is more widely represented in the English than in the Spanish film scripts, thus confirming the assertion that being indirect is a distinctive feature of English native speakers (Grundy, 2008). This research makes a valuable contribution to the exploration of speech acts in filmspeak and informs the existing local grammar descriptions of the linguistic patterns of directive speech acts.

Existing studies on the online asynchronous consultation mode afforded by ‘Ask-the-Expert’ health websites (e.g. Thomson et al. 2012) are concerned with the possible loss in the quality of interaction between patients and clinicians in this type of consultation. The potential loss is worrying, given the central role of patient-centred communication (PCC), particularly empathy, in medical consultation practice and patients’ increasing use of and reliance on online consultations. This study addresses the following three related questions: (1) To what extent is PCC represented in ‘Ask-the-Expert’ healthcare websites? (2) Are there noticeable differences in PCC between sites operating in different linguistic and cultural settings (the UK, Spain and Italy)? (3) What are the implications of the above? Seventy exchanges from the leading independent health websites NetDoctor (UK), Netdoctor (Spain) and Medicitalia (Italy) were analysed, adapting a framework developed for the linguistic analysis of clinical empathy (combining discourse analytical and pragmatic categories – Pounds 2011) and drawing on existing definitions of PCC and classifications of advice-giving structures. The analysis shows that PCC is used on these sites to varying degrees, conforming to the site’s affordances. The significance of the findings and potential further applications of the analytical framework are discussed in the final part.

Given that pragmatic competence is one of the main competences of foreign language learning (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages 2002 and Plan Curricular del Instituto Cervantes 2006), it is vital that learners of Spanish be aware of pragmatic elements while learning the language. Therefore, language teacher training syllabi should include pragmatics in their programs of study. The two main aims of this study are: (a) to fill a research void in the analysis of pragmatics training in the teaching of Spanish and (b) to make both teachers and students pragmatically aware when teaching and learning Spanish. In order to carry out these objectives, syllabi for the study of pragmatics on MA programs were analyzed and both teachers’ and students’ views on pragmatics modules were elicited