Spanish and English in U.S. Service Encounters


Book Description

Service encounters involve communication between strangers. Communication - or, at times, miscommunication - between strangers who come from different groups can foster the formation of stereotypes. This is therefore an area of particular relevance for investigation. Using service encounters as a vehicle, Callahan examines Spanish as social capital in the United States, focusing on who may use this language and under what circumstances. This book contributes to an examination of Spanish in the United States as a language of selected uses and selected users, along with the factors that can influence United States Latinos acceptance of its use by other Latinos and by non-Latinos.




The Language of Service Encounters


Book Description

A comprehensive account of face-to-face interactions in commercial and non-commercial service encounter settings.




The Language of Service Encounters


Book Description

Service encounters are ubiquitous in social interaction. We buy food and everyday items in supermarkets, convenience stores, or markets; we purchase merchandise in department stores; or we request information at a visitor information center. This book offers a comprehensive account of service encounters in commercial and non-commercial settings. Grounded in naturally occurring face-to-face interactions and drawing on a pragmatic-discursive approach, J. César Félix-Brasdefer sets out a framework for the analysis of transactional and relational talk in various contexts in the United States and Mexico. This book investigates cross-cultural and intra-lingual pragmatic variation during the negotiation of service. The author provides a broad review of research on service encounters to date, and analyzes characteristics of sales transactions, such as participants' roles, pragmatic and discourse functions of relational talk and address forms, the realization of politeness, and changes in alignment from transactional to relational talk.




Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders


Book Description

Spanish and Portuguese Across Time covers a diverse range of topics with a common focus, on the dynamic nature of languages and the social forces that shape them across time, place, and borders, and demonstrates how linguistic principles can offer productive angles to the study of literature.




The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace provides a comprehensive survey of linguistic research on language in the workplace written by top scholars in the field from around the world. The Handbook covers theoretical and methodological approaches, explores research in different types of workplace settings, and examines some key areas of workplace talk that have been investigated by workplace researchers. Issues of identity have become a major focus in recent workplace research and the Handbook highlights some core issues of relevance in this area, such as gender, leadership, and intercultural communication. As the field has developed, applications of workplace research for both native and non-native speakers have emerged. Insights can inform and improve input from practitioners training workers in a range of fields and across a variety of contexts, and the Handbook foregrounds some of the ways workplace research can do this. This is an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate students interested in learning more about workplace discourse.




Researching Sociopragmatic Variability


Book Description

Researching Sociopragmatic Variability showcases a range of research approaches to the study of speech acts and pragmatic markers across different languages and varieties of a language, investigating native and non-native usages and variation across gender, situation and addressee.




First Encounters


Book Description

Describes the early Spanish contact with New World peoples and events that followed Columbus's landing.




Technology Mediated Service Encounters


Book Description

The chapters in this collection, authored by renowned scholars, address a gap in the literature by focusing on the consequences that outsourcing, among other globalized economic practices, and remediation by new technologies have had on the service encounters genre (SE). From both a multilingual and a multidisciplinary perspective, this collection explores the development of technological applications and professional best practices as well as call centre interaction, e-commerce, and e-word of mouth. More specifically, the papers in this volume report on technology developed to support SEs and how this technology influences service providers and their allowable linguistic contributions. Further, this collection provides valuable insights on the language and strategic behaviour deployed in less researched kinds of SEs, gives special attention to how technology impacts the interface between the transactional and interactional goals of SEs, and thus has real world applications.




A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters


Book Description

In A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters, María de la O Hernández-López and Lucía Fernández-Amaya have joined marketing researchers and linguists to provide the tools to understand consumers’ communication in different professional settings. Service encounters have been widely studied due to the fact that the communicative exchange between the customer and the server is essential for the success of the service encounter itself. In this volume, the role of language, linguistics and communication is examined in an area of research that has traditionally been related to business and marketing. This is achieved through the presentation of works from a variety of perspectives that may help to advance in this particular context and also contribute to improving communication in service encounters.




The Invention of Multilingualism


Book Description

Multilingualism is a meaningful and capacious idea about human meaning-making practice, one with a promising, tumultuous, and flawed present - and a future worth caring for in research and public life. In this book, David Gramling presents original new insights into the topical subject of multilingualism, describing its powerful social, economic and political discourses. On one hand, it is under acute pressure to bear the demands of new global supply-chains, profit margins, and supranational unions, and on the other it is under pressure to make way for what some consider to be better descriptors of linguistic practice, such as translanguaging. The book shows how multilingualism is usefully able to encompass complex, divergent, and sometimes opposing experiences and ideas, in a wide array of planetary contexts - fictitious and real, political and social, North and South, colonial and decolonial, individual and collective, oppressive and liberatory, embodied and prosthetic, present and past.