Pragmatic Variation: Spain

Spain, officially the Kingdom of Spain (Spanish: España, Reino de España), is a country located in Southern Europe, with two small exclaves in North Africa (both bordering Morocco). Spain is a democracy which is organized as a parliamentary monarchy. It is a developed country with the eighth-largest economy in the world. It is the larger of two sovereign states that make up the Iberian Peninsula - the other is Portugal.

Some representative works on treating Peninsular pragmatics have focused on the following themes:

Speech Acts:

• Advice in colloquial Salamanca Spanish (Hernández-Flores, 1999)
• Requests in service encounters in Madrid (Placencia, 1998)
• Degrees of (in)directness in Peninsular Spanish (Márquz Reiter, 2002)
• Interactional aspects of colloquial conversation (Briz, 2001)

Discourse markers:

• The polite use of me entiendes in service encounters in Madrid (Chodorowska, 1997)

Below are examples of requests and advice-giving as realized in different regions of Spain.