Oye, ¿qué onda con mi dinero?

Abstract

The objective of this study is to broaden the focus of pragmatic research to include the speech act of complaints produced by heritage speakers of Spanish. In addition to being a face-threatening act, the diverse ways in which complaints are expressed makes them a rich source for investigating how language use can vary across speech communities. Although there has been some research concerning contexts of intercultural communication, the pragmatic proficiency of heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States is an area that merits further investigation. In order to examine heritage speaker complaints, this study compares data from the following three groups: Mexican native speakers of Spanish (22), native speakers of English (40), and heritage speakers of Spanish (21). The heritage speakers and English native speakers in this study were undergraduate students at a large public university in California, while the native speakers of Spanish were university students in Mexico. All the participants completed an on-line Discourse Completion Test that included three complaint scenarios.

Greeting and leave-taking in Texas

“…While the study targets requests, its findings nonetheless inform research of other speech acts by bilingual heritage Spanish speakers. Pinto and Raschio observe that heritage speakers in their study had a unique intercultural style, further supported by Pinto and Raschio's (2008) study of complaints. Similarly, García (1981) identifies certain aspects of leavetaking among a family in Los Angeles that she considers particular to Mexican-Americans.…”

The Prosodic Expression of Sarcasm vs. Sincerity by Heritage Speakers of Spanish

“…While detecting the precise source of language change-either internal or external-is unlikely, situations of language contact, as in the English-Spanish contact situation in the United States, can give rise to some developments that have already been observed in the Spanish language (Montrul 2012;Silva-Corvalán 1994, 2001. Given the relatively small body of research on the pragmatics of Spanish as a heritage language and the inconsistency of results, Pinto and Raschio (2008) synthesize recommendations for more research on specific topics, such as contexts in which heritage Spanish is similar to monolingual varieties of Spanish as well as monolingual varieties of English, and contexts in which heritage Spanish is significantly different from monolingual varieties of Spanish, monolingual English or both. In situations of extensive language contact, Blum-Kulka and Sheffer (1993) suggest that pragmatic features may be among the first to be influenced due to many factors; therefore, more research in this area is needed.…”

Learning and Teaching Pragmatics in the Globalized World: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Existing research shows that heritage learners’ pragmatic performance falls between two ends of a speaker spectrum—speakers of a home language and a societal language. For example, Pinto and Raschio (2007, 2008) found that heritage learners use distinct speech act strategies and mitigations, which distinguish them from speakers of a home language, but they are not completely in line with speakers of a societal language in their use of downgraders. This hybridity primarily comes from heritage speakers’ experience in the two speech communities (home and societal), which involve different social settings, communicative goals, conventions, and norms of interaction.…”