LA CORTESÍA VERBAL EN EL ESPAÑOL. Estudio sobre la cortesía en tres artículos académicos dentro del campo de la didáctica ELE

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of politeness in verbal interaction in academical publications. This study aims to determine what we understand by the role of politeness in spoken language and in what way it is represented in three academic articles within the area of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). Three articles of the academic journal marcoELE were studied. This study parts from the notion of pragmatic competence as a skill of knowing how to create and understand meanings in interaction effectively (Thomas, 1995: 22), which in intercultural interaction probably requires extra-linguistic knowledge more than language skills (cf. Bravo, 2005: 364). The hypothesis postulated at the beginning of the study was that the articles would be quite similar in the way that the articles treated the aspects of pragmatics. We also postulated the hypothesis that there were potencial to develop a pragmatic competence among the educators, for example through specific examples of exercises in the material that was studied. To some extent it can be said that the hypothesis is confirmed: the articles focused on politeness exemplified with extra-linguistic information and communicative activities and in the articles that were studied, metapragmatic information were combined with activities. The activities aimed to develop communicative skills with focus on different situations of politeness, such as different ways of apologise among english learners of Spanish as a foreign Language and native speakers of Spanish. Despite the fact that the main purposes of our study were fulfilled, questions for possible future investigations remain, such as the definition of who determines what things could be considered as being polite and in what situations.