Pragmatic variation within languages

Abstract

Speakers sharing the same language have been found to use this language in systematically different ways. Language-internal pragmatic variation can be observed across nations, regions, and social groups, correlating with such demographic factors as ethnicity, gender, and age. Yet, while there is a huge body of work examining pragmatic differences between languages, the study of pragmatic differences within languages is, by contrast, relatively recent and still developing. Much early work in this area has been carried out on a handful of speech acts in some national varieties of, notably, Spanish and English, by employing experimental methods such as discourse completion tasks and role plays. Since then, varieties of lesser studied Indo-European languages as well as of non-Indo-European languages have been considered, including post-colonial varieties, and there is a wide range of further novelties concerning in particular procedures of data gathering and the pragmatic features investigated, thus broadening the scope of the analysis. The aim of this article collection is to showcase the diversity in this growing subfield of pragmatics, while this introductory article provides an overview of the topics, methods, and findings in the papers included in this collection, with a view to encouraging more research into pragmatic variation within languages.