Contrasting the Pragmatics of Spanishes

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Abstract This special issue explores contrastive pragmatics with a focus on Spanish in comparison with other languages and varieties. The collection assembles studies comparing Spanish with Chinese, Greek, English, French, and Italian, as well as investigations of pragmatic variation across different varieties of Spanish. The contributions examine a diverse range of pragmatic phenomena, including humour, impoliteness, aggression, mitigation, requests, complaints, and mourning practices, across various communicative contexts from face-to-face conversations to digital platforms. Methodologically, the studies employ both naturalistic corpora and experimental approaches, with many incorporating multimodal analysis to account for the complexity of contemporary communication. The collection highlights how platformization reshapes interactional norms through multimodal affordances, structures genre-specific speech act patterns, and complicates methodological approaches in pragmatic research. By exploring how pragmatic meaning and interactional patterns vary across languages, communities, and digital/physical contexts, this special issue contributes to our understanding of pragmatic variation, particularly in interpersonally sensitive communicative activities, while raising important questions about the assumptions and methods of contrastive pragmatics in an increasingly globalized and digitally mediated world.