The Language of Service Encounters

J. César Félix-Brasdefer is Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. His recent publications include Politeness in Mexico and the United States (2008) and Pragmatic Variation in First and Second Language Contexts (edited with Dale Koike, 2012).

• Introduction; 1. Approaches to service encounters: a pragmatic-discursive analysis of social action; 2. Service encounters in commercial and non-commercial settings; 3. Cross-cultural service encounters: negotiating service in the United States and Mexico; 4. Intra-lingual pragmatic variation in service encounters; 5. Negotiating service in Mexican markets; 6. Intra-cultural service encounters at a US visitor information center; 7. Relational talk and the negotiation of face in service encounters; 8. Forms of address and politeness in service encounters; 9. Conclusions.

'Félix-Brasdefer provides an in-depth, multi-layered account of the sociolinguistic and pragmatic dimensions of service encounters in the US and Mexico. Detailed analysis of both Spanish and English data offers readers fascinating insights into cross-cultural variation.' Camilla Vásquez, University of South Florida