Evaluation as a pragmatic act in Spanish film narratives

Abstract

This paper analyzes the use of evaluative language in twenty native Spanish speakers’ oral narrations of the pear film ( Chafe, 1980) in light of Mey's (2001) proposal that pragmatic acts must be looked at from the point of view of the speaker and his/her experience and background knowledge, as well as the language used in performing the pragmatic act itself. Evaluative utterances in the narratives are viewed as instances of ‘situated speech acts’ ( Mey, 2001) rendered possible on account of the speakers’ underlying assumptions and contextual factors. Analysis of the discourse reveals a tendency by some of the narrators to explicitly verbalize their points of view by sharing their thoughts about, reactions to, and appraisals of specific elements in the film. In addition, several of the speakers evaluated the behaviors of the characters in the film by passing judgment on and/or criticizing the appropriateness or correctness of their actions. Other evaluations involved the attribution of features and properties of entities that were not explicitly part of the cotext. The inclusion of these attributes, it is argued, reflects the fact that they contrasted in some way with the speaker's preconceived idea of what is expected, ordinary, or normal. This study shows how observed tendencies in the narrators’ use of evaluation are constrained by the background knowledge of the narrators and the social relationships between the narrators and the interlocutors, characterized in terms of the relationship of power and the social distance between speaker and addressee. Together, these factors make up the context in which acts of evaluation are possible and thus help define the pragmeme of evaluation.