Evaluation as a Pragmatic Act in Spanish Film Narratives

Evaluation as a pragmatic act in Spanish film narratives

Sarah E. Blackwell

Department of Romance Languages, The University of Georgia, Gilbert Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA

1. Introduction

This paper analyzes twenty native Spanish speakers’ oral narrations of the pear film1 (Chafe, 1980), taking into account thenotion that pragmatic acts (including, but not limited to speech acts) must be looked at from the point of view of not only thelanguage used in performing the act, but also the individual agent (speaker), his/her background knowledge, and thelimitations and possibilities the ‘‘situation is subject to or opens up, as the case may be’’ (Mey, 2001:214). In addition, thestudy adopts Mey’s view that verbalizations (here, narrations of the pear film) are instances of ‘situated speech acts’ that arerendered possible on account of the underlying assumptions that make both the speakers’ utterances appropriate and thecontext of the discourse possible. Using these ideas as the point of departure, the present study focuses on two centralquestions. Firstly, given the fact that the narrators’ task (retelling a film after watching it),2 the content of the film itself, and

Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2945–2963

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history:

Received 10 June 2010

Accepted 15 June 2010

Keywords:

Evaluation

Narrative

Pragmeme

Speech act

Power

Solidarity

Social distance

A B S T R A C T

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.

� 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

E-mail address: [email protected] This 6-min short film with a sound-track but no speech was originally created for a research project involving a set of studies described in The Pear

Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production (Chafe, 1980). See Chafe (1980:xiii–xiv) for a summary of the film.2 Originally these narratives were elicited for a study on anaphoric reference in Spanish narrative discourse (see Blackwell, 2003).

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the experimental situation (i.e. the conditions under which the narratives were elicited) were the same for all of thenarrators in the study, what were the major differences among the narratives in terms of the narrators’ use of evaluation?Evaluation can be defined briefly for the time being as ‘‘the expression of the writer’s or speaker’s opinion’’ (Thompsonand Hunston, 2000:2).3 Secondly, this study addresses the issue of how to account for the differences among thenarratives with regard to the speakers’ acts of evaluation. More specifically, what characteristics of the individualnarrators (e.g. their background knowledge, the common ground of the speaker and listener, and their relationship toeach other) and of other aspects of the context explain the differences in what the speakers evaluate and how theyverbalize their evaluations?

Earlier analyses of these Spanish narrations of the pear film (Blackwell, 2001, 2009) revealed that the speakers used avariety of strategies that Tannen (1979, 1980) had identified in American English and Greek speakers’ oral narrations of thefilm. Tannen (1979) focused on the influence of underlying structures of expectations on the speakers’ verbalizations andidentified elements that tended to characterize the Greeks’ narratives on the one hand, and the Americans’ narratives on theother. Blackwell (2009) demonstrates how frames, i.e. ‘‘what people think they are doing when they talk to each other’’(Tannen, 1993:6, following Bateson, 1954), and schemas interact, and how the Spanish narrators’ expectations andassumptions influence their framings of the discourse (i.e. the activities they are participating in when speaking, e.g.storytelling, critiquing a film, and performing an experimental recall task).

One notable variable in the Spanish narratives is the degree of subjectivity with which the narrators retell the film.Whereas some of the speakers focus mainly on remembering and recounting the film’s main events, while providingrelatively minimal descriptions and little or no evaluation, others add personal interpretations of the film’s events andevaluative commentary, which, not surprisingly, result in lengthier and more detailed narratives. Furthermore, the Spanishnarrators’ verbalizations appear to send a meta-message based on an overarching tenet of conversational storytellingproposed by Polanyi (1985:1): ‘‘[p]eople do not choose to talk to each other at length ‘about’ matters which are not of someinterest to them’’.

In this paper I shall argue that evaluative utterances in the Spanish narratives may be viewed as ‘‘instantiated (orindividual) pragmatic acts’’ (Mey, 2001:220–221). As such, an act of evaluation will be viewed as ‘‘a situated action. . .madepossible and afforded by and in a particular situation, on a particular scene’’ (Mey, 2001:219). Evaluative commentary in thenarratives is therefore analyzed in light of not only the actual utterances and their cotext, but also the interlocutors’ sharedcultural and social norms, personal relationships and experiences, and other relevant features of the context. By followingthis approach, we may characterize the more general pragmeme (see section 4) of evaluation. This approach contrasts withthe one used by Tannen in her pear film studies in which she treats each group of narrators (twenty Greeks and twentyAmericans) as virtually monolithic groups and does not consider the individual characteristics of the participants or otherfeatures of the social context.

Section 2 examines how the notion of evaluation has been defined in previous studies involving the analysis of discourse.In section 3 I review some relevant findings from earlier studies that also focused on speakers’ verbalizations and their use ofevaluation in elicited oral narratives. In section 4 I discuss the notion of the pragmeme (Mey, 2001, 2007) in light of myproposal that evaluative utterances be viewed as instantiated pragmatic acts which pertain to the pragmeme of evaluation.In section 5 I identify two notions, power and social distance, as factors that may explain differences in the speakers’evaluative acts in the film narratives. Section 6 describes the participants in this study and the data collection andtranscription methods used. In section 7, the Spanish narratives are analyzed in terms of the speakers’ realizations ofevaluative acts in their portrayal of the opening scene of the film and the contextual features that make up the situation.Finally, section 8 summarizes the conclusions reached from the analysis.

2. Defining evaluation in discourse

According to Thompson and Hunston (2000), evaluation can refer to a speaker or writer’s expression of his or her opinionabout any state of affairs, be it positive or negative, certain, uncertain, and so on. They sum up their definition as follows:

. . . evaluation is the broad cover term for the expression of the speaker’s or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpointon, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about. That attitude may relate to certainty orobligation or desirability or any of a number of other sets of values. (2000:5)

By adopting this broad definition of evaluation, the focus of the present study is not only on the linguistic expression ofevaluation, but also on the ‘‘why, when, how, and what’’ the narrators evaluate (Thompson and Hunston, 2000:5–6). Thisapproach contrasts with approaches that focus primarily on specific lexical and syntactic items that constitute the ‘narrativestructural component’ of evaluation defined in Labov’s (1972) model.

According to Thompson and Hunston, recognizing information as evaluative involves identifying ‘‘signals of comparison,subjectivity, and social value’’ (2000:13). Specifically, it (1) involves a comparison of the object against a yardstick of somekind, (2) is subjective, and (3) is value-laden (Thompson and Hunston, 2000:21). Thompson and Hunston also identify threegeneral functions of evaluation: (1) to express the speaker’s/writer’s opinion and reflect the value system of that person and

3 See section 2 for a more in-depth discussion of evaluation.

S.E. Blackwell / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2945–29632946

their community; (2) to construct and maintain relations between the speaker or writer and hearer or reader; and (3) toorganize the discourse (2000:6). For instance, in expressing an opinion, a speaker or writer can convey his or her ideology,and more specifically, ‘‘what counts as good or bad, what should or should not happen, what counts as true or untrue’’(2000:7). S/he can also attempt to persuade the recipient to see things in a particular way, as valid, or from a particular pointof view.

Language users can express evaluation through the use of specific linguistic elements, including nouns, verbs, adjectives,and adverbs that appraise entities and events in terms of good versus bad or positive versus negative. Some lexical items areobviously evaluative based on their function and meaning. For example, splendid (adj.), happily (adv.), success (noun), andsucceed (verb) all convey positive evaluations (examples from Thompson and Hunston, 2000:14). Certain terms can refer tosocially valued concepts, where the value associated with a term (i.e. its connotation) depends on the associations that anindividual makes with that term. According to Allan (2007:1048), ‘‘[i]dentifying the connotation of a term is to identify thecommunity attitude towards it’’.4 Language users can also evaluate propositions via the use of modal verbs such as could,which reflect the speaker’s opinion about the likelihood of an event.5

Labov (1972) emphasizes the comparative nature of evaluation, where evaluation refers to ‘‘anything which is comparedto or contrasts with the norm’’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000:13). Similarly, Linde (1997) identifies two dimensions ofevaluation: reference to reportability and reference to social norms. Linde explains that ‘‘[t]he notion of reportability makesuse of norms of predictability of events, contrasting events that can be expected and events that are out of the ordinary’’(1997:153). The second dimension, reference to social norms, refers to

moral comments or demonstrations of theway theworld is, theway theworld ought to be, what proper behaviour is, andthe kind of people that the speaker and addressees are. This is one particular form of normative judgement: what kind ofbehaviour can be expected of a good person. (Linde, 1997:153)

Linde’s two ‘dimensions’ reflect the three ‘inherent characteristics’ of evaluation identified by Thompson and Hunston:comparison, subjectivity, and social value. However, they also echo Labov’s emphasis on the comparative nature ofevaluation (i.e. as anything which is compared to or contrasts with the norm), as well as the notion of structures ofexpectation expounded on by Tannen (1979, 1980) in her seminal work analyzing the pear film narratives, to be discussed inthe following section.

3. Studies on evaluation in elicited oral narratives

Most relevant to the present study are the studies by Tannen (1979, 1980) in which she analyzed the pear film narrativesproduced by twenty Greek and twenty American women, all of whom were asked the same question about the film, What

happened in the movie?, right after viewing it. According to Tannen (1979), the comparison of these narratives reveals thatstructures of expectation about objects and events in the film are often culturally determined. By structures of expectation,Tannen refers to the prior experience or organized knowledge that takes the form of expectations about the world andaccounts for

the realization that people approach the world not as naive, blank-slate receptacles who take in stimuli as they exist insome independent and objective way, but rather as experienced and sophisticated veterans of perception who havestored their prior experiences as ‘‘an organized mass,’’ and who see events and objects in the world in relation to eachother and in relation to their prior experience. (Tannen, 1979:144)

Tannen (1979) shows how the Greek and American narrators’ expectations, based on their background assumptions andexperience, have an effect on what they choose to talk about in their film narratives. She observes that the participantsaltered the content of the movie in many ways in their retelling of the film, which, she argues, provides evidence of theirstructures of expectation about objects and events in the film and about the situation and task of talking about a film.

Tannen relates the notion of structures of expectations to Labov’s concept of evaluation, stating that ‘‘since the point of anarrative is directly related to the expectations of people in the culture in which it is told, it is not surprising that Labov’sevaluative elements are closely related to the notion of evidence of expectations’’ (Tannen, 1979:145). She goes on to identifysixteen types of evidence, which, shemaintains, ‘‘represent the imposition of the speakers’ expectations on the content of thefilm’’ (1979:145).

In general, those aspects of the film that the Greek and American narrators deemed to be less expected or predictable,or more out of the ordinary, tended to be the ones the speakers reported on in greater detail. Thus, while severalAmericans reported on and evaluated the film ‘‘as a film’’ (Tannen, 1979:155, 1980:60), the Greeks did not showpreoccupation with this aspect of it. In fact, none of them criticized the film as a film, and half of them told their narrativeswithout making any reference to the film at all. Instead, they tended ‘‘to interpret and make judgments about the events

4 Allan cites Backhouse’s (2003) example of English octopus and the Japanese translation equivalent tako to illustrate how connotations vary between the

American and Japanese cultures: ‘‘an octopus is a sinister, alien creature; tako is edible and endearing’’ (2007:1048).5 Thompson and Hunston (2000) note that this type of evaluation is traditionally referred to as modality (see Halliday, 1994).

S.E. Blackwell / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2945–2963 2947

and the people portrayed’’ (1979:155). They also commented on the significance of events, showing interest ininterpreting the message of the film (1979:156, 1980:63). For instance, in one excerpt cited by Tannen (1979:156), aGreek narrator uses what Tannen calls interpretive devices and conveys a romantic view of the meaning of the film. Shediscusses the pearpicker’s positive attitude toward his work (thus giving her own interpretation and evaluation of hisattitude), and later notes how the interaction between the boys in the film shows ‘‘how children love each other’’(1979:156). Tannen concludes that this speaker’s ‘‘interpretations seem to be motivated by her own expectations aboutfarmers and children’’ (1979:156).

The Greeks’ descriptions of the characters’ actions also convey their evaluation of those actions. According toTannen, the Greek women often interpreted the events for their significance or value and passed judgment on thebehavior of the film’s characters. For instance, several Greek women commented on the bike boy’s not thanking thethree boys right away for helping him (1979:175, 1980:66); and, five of the Spanish speakers in the present study didthe same. This type of evaluation, involving the moral judgment of the characters in the film, was not found in theAmericans’ narratives.

Tannen (1979) also identifies as evaluative language the use of adjectives and adverbs to describe the setting, people,objects, and events. With regard to adjectives, for instance, she observes that when they do occur,

the fact that the speaker chose that quality to comment upon is significant, andmore often than not, the quality expressedreveals some comparison with what might have been expected. For example a Greek woman calls the pearpicker psilos(‘‘tall’’) while no American does. This may well reflect some framelike notion of how tall a person ordinarily is. (Tannen,1979:173)

The fact that this speaker describes the pearpicker as ‘tall’ reflects her evaluation of this feature against a ‘yardstick’(Thompson and Hunston, 2000). And, in mentioning this feature, the speaker compares it with what she would consider the‘norm’ (Labov, 1972).

Several strategies Tannen (1979, 1980) identifies in the Greek and American English pear film narratives are evaluative innature including: ascribing social roles andmotives to the characters; attempts to capture the significance of events throughexplanations for why things happened; subjective value judgments; and inferences about the characters’ emotions,intentions, thoughts, and feelings. Since these strategies involve the imposition of a speaker’s subjective perspective andsocial values on their narrations, they may be viewed as evaluative acts.

Küntay and Nakamura (2004) examine the types of evaluative devices used by Japanese and Turkish children and adultsin narrations of the wordless picture-book story entitled Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969). They identify various devicesused evaluatively by the Japanese and Turkish speakers and compare their findings with those of Bamberg and Damrad-Frye(1991), who carried out a similar study with English-speaking children. Bamberg and Damrad-Frye had identified fivecategories of evaluative devices, and Küntay and Nakamura added four additional categories. Some of these categoriesinclude: references to characters’ mental and affective states; character speech (i.e. reported speech, or what Tannen (1989)calls constructed dialogue); hedges (e.g. probably, seems like, and I think); causal connectors (e.g. because of that, therefore, inorder to); enrichment expressions (adverbial phrases and connectives such as suddenly and however); and intensifiers such asvery (Küntay and Nakamura, 2004:337–339).

One important observation Küntay and Nakamura make is the need to consider cultural factors when analyzing thenarratives. For instance, Japanese children are used to telling personal narratives to their mothers or other familymembers while receiving constant verbal acknowledgement and back-channelling from them, whereas the researcherfailed to provide such feedback during the elicitation of the narratives. In addition, the authors report that being apersonal acquaintance of the researcher, as opposed to being a complete stranger, influenced the use of evaluativeforms in narrators’ frog stories. Specifically, they note, ‘‘[i]n general, stories told to a researcher who was familiar withthe children resulted in longer, more detailed stories, with richer, evaluative content’’ (2004:357). This generalizationhighlights the need to consider the nature of the relationship between narrator and recipient(s) and the overallsocial context in which narratives are produced to account for evaluative utterances—factors emphasized in the presentstudy.

4. Pragmemes and evaluation as a pragmeme

Mey’s theory of pragmatic acts focuses on the situation in which the speaker and hearer ‘‘find their affordances’’(2001:221), where the notion of affordability refers to what I can do, say, and understand given the context, and alsowhat the situation or scene can afford (2001:218). Within his theory, Mey proposes the concept of the ‘pragmeme’, or‘generalized pragmatic act’, which refers to the characterization of ‘‘a general situational prototype, capable of beingexecuted in the situation’’ (2001:221). Mey refers to the actual realizations of a pragmeme as ‘‘instantiated, individualpragmatic acts’’ or ‘‘ipras’’ and maintains that no two of them are exactly the same. As an example, he cites the work ofKurzon (1998) on the pragmeme of incitement and his conclusion that ‘‘any utterance may constitute an act ofincitement if the circumstances are appropriate to allow for such an interpretation’’ (1998:28, cited by Mey, 2001:221).Other cases of pragmemes Mey addresses in his proposal include ‘‘inviting, co-opting, denying, [and] bribing’’(2001:221).


Mey’s proposal raises the question of the user’s possibilities in a given situation, what realizations of a given pragmemeare possible, i.e. what can be said in the situation, andwhat is actually said. Additionally, in lieu of trying to define the rules orprinciples that account for the possible realizations of a particular pragmeme,Mey argues that we focus on determining howthe language used is constrained by the circumstances of the speech situation. As such, Mey proposes a theory of speech actsthat focuses on the features of the situational context and how these allow a speaker’s utterance to count as and beinterpreted as a realization of a category of acts or pragmeme.

Capone (2005) also places importance on the context of the utterance and exploiting the situation of use in the analysis ofspeech acts so as to enrich the interpretation of utterances (2005:1356). He suggests that norms of language use beviewed as part of the interlocutors’ common ground such that how an utterance is interpreted may be determined bycertain shared norms that are implicitly characteristic of a particular discourse type or pragmatic act. For example, theutterance I saw you, which could have the illocutionary force of an accusation, may acquire a different force in a differentcontext. For instance, in hide-and-seek, the utterance provides a reason for children to start running, whereas I saw you,when spoken by a teacher to a student who is whispering an answer to his classmate is transformed into a warning tostop telling him the answer (Capone, 2005:1363). With this example, Capone illustrates how the social situation, withits rules and expectations governing students’ obligations and teachers’ tasks, promotes the intended interpretation(2005:1363).

Capone (2005) also takes the formulaic utterance Can I help you? and demonstrates how it is transformed into a specificpragmeme by the context of the utterance. Because it is associated with a highly institutionalized form of talk (that of aservice counter situation), when uttered in a shop, it is unmistakably an offer of assistance based on the norm of interactionbetween customers and salespersons. However, as Capone points out, the samewordsmean something completely differentwhen uttered by a passer-by to someone who has had an accident. This example illustrates the need to take intoconsideration the entire context of speaking, including the situation and speaker roles and expectations, in addition to thelinguistic form used, in order to determine the intended force and meaning of an utterance.

Mey (2007) relates the notion of the pragmeme to that of institutional dominance and institutionalization in differentcultures—institutions being governing bodies that dominate and constrain peoples’ lives in a particular culture, e.g. churchesand synagogues. He uses the example of the pragmeme of questioning to illustrate how an institution that forms the socialcontext can prescribe relevant behavior. For instance, on the one hand, questioning is an institutionalized military behaviorwhen used for extracting useful information from a detainee; on the other, perhaps the most familiar American institutionwhere questioning is practiced, and in which speakers exercise authority in an interrogation situation, is ‘‘the educationalsituation, where the pragmeme of Questioning captures and legalizes this behavior’’ (Mey, 2007:178). It is important to note,asMey does, that a speech act subsumed under the corresponding pragmeme of questioning ‘‘onlymakes sense in a situationof power, where the presence and distribution of power is understood and accepted by all the participants’’ (2007:178).Furthermore, Mey adds, ‘‘a question can only be a valid speech act if it is subsumed under the corresponding pragmeme andconforms with the conditions governing that pragmeme, including the situation in which the question is, or may be, asked’’(2007:178). As a result, questioning in an educational setting and interrogating a prisoner are two completely differentpragmemes even though they share some superficial features.

5. Power, social distance, and evaluation

Thomas points out that ‘‘power is present to a degree in all relationships, at least some of the time’’ (1995:126). In fact, sheidentifies the relative power of the speaker over the hearer as one of the factors governing indirectness in interaction, noting,for example, that onewould tend to bemore indirectwhen conveying annoyance to an employer about the fact that he or shealways arrives late, than when expressing the same annoyance to one’s brother (1995:124). Clearly, power may bedistributed differently among the participants in any interaction, depending on the situation and the social relationshipbetween the participants. Thomas, citing work by Spencer-Oatey (1992), describes three categories of power a speaker mayhave over another: ‘legitimate power’, based on the speaker’s role, age, or status; ‘referent power’, whereby a person hasgreater power on account of being admired by another; and ‘expert power’, based on the fact that a person has some specialknowledge or expertise (1995:127).

In the case of acts of evaluation, certain speakers, in certain roles, may be licensed to express their opinions, i.e. evaluate asituation, while others may not be, on account of differences in the distribution of power among the participants. In thissense power is a factor that constrains and helps create an appropriate context for evaluation. Take for instance the case ofacademic evaluations, which are a common practice at schools and universities. In this context, evaluating is clearly an act ofauthority: the instructor has the authority to evaluate his or her students (e.g. via feedback on exams, quizzes, and classparticipation); and, s/he is both expected and required to do so in this context. In addition, there is a tacit understanding thatthe instructor of a class ismore knowledgeable about the subjectmatter being taught than are his/her students, and thus s/heis in a position to evaluate their work. The fact that authority and power are involved in the act of evaluation in academicinstitutions is also evidenced by the fact that, at most American universities, students are asked (or required) to evaluatetheir classes and their instructors’ teaching performance at the end of a term. However, they must do so anonymously viawritten evaluations, so that the instructor does not know (or at best can only guess) the identity of the students doing theevaluations. This quotidian example illustrates how not all language users are equally licensed to openly express theiropinions via evaluation on account of institutionalized power distinctions.Where evaluation in the Spanish filmnarratives is


concerned,we can hypothesize that the social construct of powerwill enter into the equation, aswill the notion of ‘solidarity’or the lack of it, that is, the social distance between the speaker and the addressee.6

Boxer (1993) identifies social distance as ‘‘an important sociolinguistic variable in the analysis of speech behavior’’, and ‘‘ameasure of the degree of friendship/intimacy (or absence thereof) between interlocutors’’ (1993:103).More importantly, shepoints out that ‘‘[s]ocial distance is one of the foremost factors that determines the way in which interlocutors converseprecisely because it is an important determinant of the degree of comfort or politeness/deference in a verbal exchange’’(Boxer, 1993:103).

The social distance variable was studied byWolfson (1988) in her work on compliments and invitations in amiddle-classAmerican speech community, and subsequently by Boxer (1993) with regard to indirect complaints or ‘commiseration’, alsoin middle-class American English. Wolfson (1988) relates speakers’ complimenting behavior and its frequency to the socialdistance between the interlocutors and reports that the great majority of compliments ‘‘occur between status equals amongwhom the potential for lessening of social distance exists’’ (1988:32). This, she argues, is due to the relative certainty ofrelationships between intimates and between status unequals or strangers, which contrasts with the instability ofrelationships between status-equal friends, co-workers, and acquaintances (1988:33). As a result, the majority (‘the bulge’)of compliments occur between speakers who are neither intimates nor total strangers, but rather friends and acquaintances,as their relationships are less certain and more dynamic and thus more open to negotiation. Furthermore, friends andacquaintances are more likely to use speech acts such as compliments and invitations to signal solidarity and avoidconfrontation than are intimates and strangers (Wolfson, 1988:33).

Boxer (1993) studies indirect complaints, which she describes as solidarity-establishing and as a type of negativeevaluation. She defines this act as ‘‘the expression of dissatisfaction to an interlocutor about a speaker himself/herself orsomeone/something that is not present’’ (1993:106). Boxer’s data include spontaneous conversational sequences betweenlong-standing friends (categorized as ‘intimate’), between neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances in a universitycommunity (‘friends’), and between ‘strangers’ in interactions in service encounters. Utterances identified as indirectcomplaints were categorized into three types by theme: (1) ‘self’, involving self-denigration; (2) ‘situation’, involvingpersonal complaints (e.g. about family, work) and impersonal complaints (e.g. about global issues); and (3) ‘other’, involvingtalk about other people (e.g. gossip). Boxer found that the most frequent theme for indirect complaints for all three groups(friends, strangers, and intimates) was that of situation, although among non-intimates indirect complaints weremore likelyto be about non-serious topics (e.g. weather, food, or impersonal situations). By contrast, in talk among close friends andintimates therewas an observed increase in indirect complaints about personal situations. In otherwords, the factor of socialdistance between the interlocutors influenced the themes the speakers voiced indirect complaints about (i.e. negativelyevaluated) as well as the frequency of their complaints. Boxer also reports that strangers did more complaining aboutthemselves than did the other two groups (friends, intimates) and very rarely complained to interlocutors about others,whereas two-thirds of the indirect complaints about others occurred among intimates. She concludes that this tendencymayreflect some kind of taboo ‘‘against talking negatively about other people to interlocutors of extreme social distance’’(1993:112), while also indicating that ‘‘it is more permissible to complain about other people to friends or intimates than tostrangers’’ (1993:112).

These observations enable us to formulate some tentative hypotheses about the social distance between the speaker andaddressee as a factor conditioning both the frequency and themes (e.g. self, others, situations) of speakers’ evaluations. Onthe one hand, we can hypothesize that intimates (e.g. closer family members) will be more likely to negatively evaluatepeople (in this case, the characters in the film), than will non-intimates (e.g. acquaintances). And, based on Wolfson’sfindings, wemight expect non-intimate family and acquaintances, whose relationships to the addressees were the least welldefined, to express fewer negative evaluations about aspects of the film (and possibly more positive, ‘complimentary’evaluations) so as to ‘play it safe’, build rapport and solidarity, and avoid any potentially face-threatening negative criticismof the film. The fact that the relationship between the Spanish narrators and the listenerwho elicited their narratives andme(the investigator) ranged from ‘intimate family to distant family and acquaintance’ (e.g. mother’s neighbor’s daughter)suggests that the factor of social distance must be examined as a potential constraint on both the frequency and the themes(e.g. people, objects, actions) of evaluative acts in the narratives.

Unlike everyday storytelling, which is a familiar social activity in Spanish society (and most likely, universally), theexperimental situation of watching a film and then talking about it while being videotaped was unfamiliar to the narrators.Since the participants in this study did not knowwhat the purpose of the experiment or the objectives of the researcherwere,they had make a determination as to how to talk about the film, and specifically, which pragmemes to select based on theirinitial sizing up of the situation. As Tannen (1979, 1980) originally hypothesized, we too could expect the narrator’sassumptions about the situation to help determine the shape his/her narrativewould take. Because the narratorwas asked totalk about a film,we could expect (at least) one of two pragmemes (or a combination of these and others) to be selected, or to‘‘kick in’’ (Mey, 2007:178). On the one hand the speaker could opt for the pragmeme of reportingwhat s/he recalled about thefilm; on the other, s/he could opt for both reporting and evaluating, or in other words, ‘editorializing’ the film, much like a

6 The concept of solidarity is defined by Brown and Gilman in terms of similarities between speakers such as ‘‘attended the same school’’ (1960:258).

These authors maintain that ‘‘[t]he similarities that matter seem to be those that make for likemindedness or similar behavior dispositions’’ (1960:258).

Thomas points out that solidarity is the opposite of social distance, which may be viewed as ‘‘a composite of psychologically real factors (status, age, sex,

degree of intimacy, etc.) which ‘together determine the overall degree of respectfulness’ within a given speech situation’’ (1995:128).


newspaper columnist both reports on and evaluates a current issue for a newspaper’s op-ed page. It was hypothesized thatthe pragmeme chosen would be partly (if not largely) attributable to the social situation that contextualized the telling,including the social relationship between the speaker and listener (as determined by social distance), as well as thepreexisting knowledge and cultural background of the speaker.

6. Method of data collection and participants

The Spanish narratives were collected in Maleján, a rural town of approximately 350 inhabitants located forty milesnorthwest of the city of Zaragoza in Aragón, a region in northeastern Spain. The pear film was shown to a total of thirtySpanish subjects in groups of between three and five at a time. Each groupwatched the film twice in a row so that it could beremembered more easily, and a narrative of approximately 3–5 min in length was elicited from each speaker individuallyshortly afterward. Before viewing the film, the participants received the same instructions fromme in Spanish and filled outa demographic questionnaire. I told them that I was interested in how people talk about what they have experienced, thatafter watching the film twice, theywould be asked to talk about it to another personwho had not seen it, and that they couldinclude any amount of detail and take as much time as needed to talk about the film. After watching the film twice through,the participantswere taken, one at a time, into a separate room for the videotaping of their narratives. I reiterated the first setof instructions before starting to record each narrative.

The listener was a 36-year-old Spanish male who was an acquaintance, friend, or family member of all of theparticipants. During thevideotaping, only the speaker narrating, the listener, and Iwerepresent. Each speaker sat facing thelistener and produced his/her narrative in a single session. During the taping, the listener interacted conversationally withthe narrator, making occasional requests for clarification or asking questions about the film. The only instructions he hadreceived prior to the elicitation of the narratives were that he should use a prompt at the beginning to get the participantstalking, such as ‘‘Cuéntame la película’’ (‘Tell me about the film’), and that he could interact with the participants howeverhe wanted. As a result, the narratives were to a greater or lesser extent interactive and conversational. All of the narrativeswere both audio and videotaped. Iwas present for the taping of each of themand occasionally spoke,mostly to reassure theparticipants.

The pear film narratives analyzed by Tannen (1979, 1980) were produced by twenty Greek and twenty American womenwhowere interviewed bywomen of roughly the same age and background. The Greekwomenwere students at the Hellenic-American Union in Athenswhose ages ranged from 16 to 26, and the Americanswere students at the University of California,Berkeley and ranged in age from 18 to 30. There were five main differences between the methodology used to gather theSpanish narratives analyzed in this study and the one used to obtain the Greek and American English narratives analyzed byTannen. Firstly, the Spanish speakerswere told that they could include any amount of detail theywanted, could take asmuchtime as they needed to talk about the film, and that there was no right or wrongway to talk about it. The fact that I stipulatedthat the participants could say whatever they wanted may have opened the door to, or invited, the use of evaluation in thenarratives. Secondly, the Spanish subjects were shown the film twice in order to facilitate recall in the hopes that theywouldproduce lengthier narratives and therefore more data to analyze later. Third, I was present for each taping session and toldthe participants that I was carrying out the study formy research; therefore, theymust have assumed that I had seen the film,whereas they had been told explicitly that the listener had not seen it.7 Fourth, both the listener (‘‘L’’ in the transcripts) and Iwere acquaintances, friends, or family members of all of the Spanish subjects. Our personal relationships with the subjectshelped to create the context of interaction, which in turn may have fomented greater subjectivity and thus more evaluationby some narrators. Finally, the Spanish narrators constituted a much less homogeneous group with regard to age andeducational background than did the Greek and American narrators.

Of the thirty narratives elicited, the first twenty recorded were chosen to be analyzed for the present study. All twentyspeakers were from the same area in Spain: seventeen were from Maleján;8 two were from Zaragoza, the capital of theregion, but spent their summers in Maleján; and one was from Borja, a larger town next to Maleján, though he had familyfrom Maleján. Their ages ranged from 16 to 75: six were between 16 and 21 years of age; three were between 36 and 45;seven were between 46 and 55 years old; and four speakers were over 65. With regard to the highest level of educationattained, nine had attended only elementary school, two had completed 3–4 years of high school, one had a degree from avocational school, two had university degrees, and the remaining sixwere high school or university students. Of the fourteennon-students, only three held white-collar jobs, while four of the six students who participated in the study had at least oneparent in a white-collar profession. Finally, sixteen of the twenty subjects were women.9

The twenty subjects are also identified according to the social distance between the speaker and the listener (L) andmyself (I) as ‘intimate family’ (immediate family members), ‘family’ (family members with whom L interacts on holidays),and ‘distant family’ (minimal social interaction) and ‘acquaintances’ (minimal social interaction) (see Appendix A). The

7 The ‘listener’ and I have basically the same social relationshipswith all of the participants in the study in terms of social distance; however, he is a native

speaker and I am a near-native speaker of Spanish.8 Eight of these subjects no longer lived in Maleján, but they spent their summer vacation, often several weeks or even the entire summer, in the town.9 The sex of the speaker is a potential factor influencing the use of evaluative speech. This factor was not examined for the present study but certainly

ought to be in a future study. However, due to the limited number ofmale participants in this study (four), any conclusions regarding the influence of the sex

of the speaker on evaluative speech would be tentative.


narratives were transcribed using Spanish orthography and transcription conventions taken from Levinson (1983:369–370)(see Appendix B).10

7. Analysis of evaluative acts in the Spanish narratives

The first step in the analysis was to distinguish evaluative utterances from non-evaluative discourse by separatingsequences that conveyed the speakers’ opinions or viewpoints on any aspect of the film from those that objectively reportedwhat happened in the film. To do this, I made use of Thompson and Hunston’s proposed notions of comparison, subjectivity,and social value (2000) and the evaluative functions and devices identified in earlier studies (see sections 2 and 3). In order tolimit the range of evaluative language analyzed, I excluded utterances in which the speakers evaluated their ownperformance, for instance, via negative statements of not remembering or knowing the exact details of the film (e.g. no sési. . ., ‘I don’t know if. . .’). Therefore, I did not examine utterances used by the speakers to reflect on, and thus evaluatemetapragmatically their recollection or interpretation of the film or what they had just said.11 Instead, I identified instancesof evaluation of any aspect of the film itself in each of the twenty narratives and generated a list of those aspects of the film.They include opinions about the setting and opening scene, the pearpicker (e.g. his role, ethnicity, appearance, actions,intentions, and thoughts), and features of the subsequent scenes in the film. I then determined which of the Spanishnarrators evaluated each of these elements.12

The ensuing analysis focuses on the major differences among the narratives in terms of (1) what the narrators chose toevaluate, (2) the kinds of evaluation used (e.g. positive, negative, comparative), and (3) the features of the context that mayaccount for the observed differences. As noted earlier, I hypothesized that the speakers’ background knowledge,assumptions, and experience, as well as the power relationship and the social distance between the narrator and theaddressees (the listener and me), would largely account for the acts of evaluation.

7.1. Evaluations of the setting and the opening scene

Seven of the Spanish subjects evaluate the setting in the opening scene. Their more subjective descriptions contrast withobjective openings such as the following one by S5, a 16-year-old, high school student and acquaintance of the listener (L):

(1) S5: La película esmuy breve. Entonces empieza con que un señor está: cogiendo peras, y tiene dos cubos llenos y unovacío.

‘S5: The film is very short. So it starts with aman he:’s picking pears, and he has two full buckets and one empty one.’

S15, a middle-aged (46–55-year-old) acquaintance from Zaragoza, describes the setting as taking place at ‘dawn’ and basesthis inference on the fact that she hears a rooster crow:

(2) S15:Buenopuesyohevisto comounamanecer,mmsupongoqueesunamanecerporqueoigocantarungalloyes lotípico, por lo menos en los pueblos, . . .

‘S15: Okaywell I saw like a dawn,mm I suppose that it’s dawn because I hear a rooster crowing and it’s the typicalthing, at least in small towns,

This speaker does not evaluate the scene positively or negatively, but rather the rooster’s crowing as being a ‘typical’ andexpected occurrence in small towns. And, she attributes her inference (that it was dawn) to the sounds she heard.

In contrast to thesemore objective openings, S1, age 75and a closemember of L’s family, evaluates her understanding of thefilm stating that she ‘got the gist’ of it. She then gives her overall appraisal of the film (corta, pero: bonita, ‘short, bu:t pretty’):

(3) S1: Pues (.) la profesora de español nos ha puesto una película, y yo en seguida la he captado. Ha sido corta, pero:bonita. Lo primero quemeha gustao ha sido ver una casa enmedio del campo, porque amí cuando hay- veo unacasa así en el campo y si encima cantan las gallinas y se ven palomitas amí es quemegustamuchísimoporque amí el campo me gusta mucho. Y he visto que había una casa de campo,. . .

‘S1: Well (.) the Spanish teacher put on a film for us, and I grasped it right away. It was short, bu:t pretty. The firstthing that I likedwas seeing a house in themiddle of the country, because tomewhen there is- I see a house likethat in the country and if on top of it the hens are singing and you see little doves it’s just that I really like it a lotbecause I like the country a lot. And I saw that there was a country house. . .’

10 All transcriptions and translations are mine and thus any errors are also mine. The narratives were transcribed verbatim, including prescriptively

ungrammatical utterances produced by the Spanish speakers.11 In Blackwell (2009) I analyze the narrators’ statements about not recalling, understanding, or noticing aspects of the film as indicators the speakers’

framings of the discourse. Such utterances also reveal the speakers’ evaluation of their own ability to accurately recall, interpret, and describe aspects of the

film.12 See Appendix C for a list of elements of the film that were evaluated, and for each of these items, the speakers who evaluated each one.


S1 adopts a romantic tone and adds details that were not in the film (e.g. there was no house and there were no littledoves), just as some of the Greek subjects in Tannen’s studies had. She describes what was on her mind as she watched thefilm (cf. Labov, 1972:372), emphasizing the features of the scene that she ‘liked’ seeing and hearing, which she clearlycompares favorablywith her preexisting idealistic view of the country. Through her positive evaluation she conveys her ownfeelings toward and background knowledge of rural Spain. S1’s depiction of the opening scene is clearly subjective andreflects her value system, in which living in the country is highly desirable.

S7, an 18-year-oldmember of L’s family, starts out by explaining what she ‘deduced’ from the opening scene andwhy shedrew such inferences:

(4) S7: Yoalprincipio hededucidoqueeranmexicanos,no sépor qué, pero:por el pañuelo (.) las patillas y el bigote.Y luego porque era así árido y tal.

‘S7: I at the beginning deduced that they were Mexicans, I don’t no why, bu:t because of the bandana (.) thesideburns and the mustache. And later because it was like arid and so forth.’

With her opening statement S7 evaluates the setting in the film and the characters as ‘Mexican’ and then providesjustification for this inference (‘arid. . . bandana. . . sideburns. . .mustache’). At the same time, she implies that these features(particularly those of the pearpicker) contrasted with what she considers to be the norm for a comparable rural setting inSpain (her ‘yardstick’), thus making them ‘reportable’.

S11, a 38-year-old familymember, opens his narrative with non-evaluative reporting. His evaluative remark comes later,after L intervenes to suggest that a goat that appears in the scene eats the pears:

(5) S11:Eeehundía al amanecer, al cantar el gallo yaestabaunhombre recolectando (.) lasperas. El hombremientras lasiba recogiendo y alguna se les caía por el suelo, eeh en el en ese transcurso pasa un señor con, con un chivo,((investigator laughs)) y

L: Se come las peras.

S11:No, pasade largo peropero entre el señor que está recolectando y él no se cruza palabra algunapor lo cua- por locual deduzco que o el señor es sordo o es tonto. ((L and investigator laugh)) Uno de dos.

‘S11: Uuuh one day at dawn,when the rooster crowed amanwas already gathering (.) pears. Themanwhile hewaspicking themandoneof themfalls [fromthem(sic)] on the ground, uuh in the in that lapseof timeamanpasseswith, with a goat ((investigator laughs)) and

L: It eats the pears.

S11:No, itpasses rightbybutbutbetween themanwho isgatheringandhimnotawordatall isexchanged fromwhi-from which I deduce that either the man is deaf or he’s stupid. ((L and investigator laugh)) One of [the] two.’

Here, L’s guessing that the goat ‘eats the pears’ instigates S11’s evaluation of the man picking pears in a tree nearby as either‘deaf or stupid’ (sordo o tonto) on account of the fact that the pearpicker never notices amanwho passes bywith a fairly noisygoat. S11’s negative yet humorous comment implies that for him, the characters in the film break from a preexisting socialnorm of interaction for people in a rural setting, namely, when you pass someone in the countryside, you should at leastacknowledge that person or ‘say hello’ (see Blackwell, 2001).

While three narrators note objectively that the film, as a film, did not have dialogue, six others,13 including S11 (a 38-year-old), S3 and S4 (ages 71 and 73 respectively), S19 and S20 (in the 45–55 age group), and S9 (an 18-year-old) note the absenceof conversation between the characters subjectively, thus suggesting that their behavior contrasted with what they wouldconsider ordinary or expected social interaction in a rural setting. In noting the absence of conversation as inappropriate orunusual behavior, these subjects seem to have ignored the fact that the film had no speech.14

S12, a 21-year-old university student who is also a member of L’s family, evaluates the qualities of film throughout hisnarrative, beginning with his opening statements:

(6) S12: Pues la película empieza con un: canto de: bueno, canto del gallo antes de: antes de: ponerse la imagen hay uncanto del gallo. Entonces, aparece un camino soleado, así bastante tranquilo, y se ve un árbol y una escalera.Entonces, bueno la película durante toda la película el sonido estámuymarcao. Toda- las cosas como no hay:como no hay palabras, como no hay diálogo,. . .

‘S12: Well the film begins with a: crowing o:f well, rooster crowing befo:re befo:re putting the image on there’s arooster crowing. Then, a sunny path appears, like pretty calm, and you see a tree and a ladder. Then, well thefilmduring thewholefilmthe sound isverymarked.All- the things since therea:ren’t since therearen’twords,since there isn’t any dialogue,. . .’

13 All six of these speakers were family members of the addressees; one of them was intimate family (S4) and one was distant family (S9).14 Similarly, Tannen (1979) observes that some of the Greek and American subjects comment on the absence of conversational interaction among the

characters in the film and suggests that this reveals the speakers’ expectation ‘‘that when two people cross paths in a setting in which they are the only

people present, they will notice and probably acknowledge each other’’ (1979:161).


S12 begins his narrative by reporting the facts objectively; however, his attention turns to the soundtrack in the film. He isthe only narrator of the twentywho evaluates the sounds in the film as a film soundtrack. In fact, he talks about and evaluatesthe ‘film as a film’ throughout his narrative, as opposed to, for instance, simply reporting what happened in the film (see alsoBlackwell, 2009). His focus on the technical features of the film makes his narrative similar to the American narrativesanalyzed by Tannen, who notes that one feature of the Americans’ narratives was their tendency to discuss and criticize thefilm as a film (Tannen, 1980). The fact that S12 finds the technical features of the pear film reportable reflects (and is possibleon account of) his background experience as a film viewer and thus his familiarity with technically well made films. That is,as a college student in Spain, he has most likely seen numerous commercial movies and is therefore in a position to evaluatethe film for its qualities as film. In addition, there is a high degree of solidarity between the narrator and his addressees due tothe fact that they are family members with common ground (e.g. they are university educated with internationalexperience). S12 can thus safely assume that his interlocutors are aware of the technical flaws in the pear film, rendering hiscriticisms of the film more objective and global (i.e. less subjective and personal).

S19, a 46-55-year-old family member, evaluates several features of the opening scene and explicitly states that ‘severalthings’ (unas cuantas cosas) caught her attention. Her description is highly personalized and subjective, as evidenced by herreferences to herself (‘caught my attention. . .my taste. . .caught my attention’), which remind the addressees that she isspeaking from her point of view:

(7) S19: Pues es una película que: (.) en realidad amímeha llamado la atenciónunas cuantas cosas. La película empiezaenunamanecer, unamanecer conbastante luzparamigusto, enelque: seoyeel cantode losgallos, y seve:puesun plano de una un campo de: de frutales, concretamente son perales. Y hay un señor que parece ser que esmexicano, tal vezpor lospor los rasgosde la cara, queestá subidoaunaescalera. Loprimeroquemeha llamao laatención era que los árboles eran frondosos, y que las peras parecía que estaban bastante verdes.

‘S19:Well it’s a filmtha:t (.) actually several things caughtmyattention. Thefilmbegins atdawn, adawnwitha lotoflight for my taste, in whi:ch you hear the roosters crowing, and you see: well a shot of a field o:f of fruit trees,specifically they’re pear trees. And there’s a man who looks like he’s Mexican, perhaps because of his facialfeatures, who is up on a ladder. The first thing that caughtmy attentionwas that the trees were leafy, and thatthe pears it looked like they were pretty unripe.’

S19 evaluates the ‘dawn’ as being too bright for her taste and explains why she says the man looks like he’s a ‘Mexican’(‘perhaps because of his facial features’). She also describes the ‘trees’ as ‘leafy’ and the pears as ‘unripe’. Her evaluativedescriptions reflect the fact that these elements in the film did not match her preexisting expectations or what she considersto be the norm (cf. Linde, 1997). Specifically, the light was too bright when compared with S19’s preferences; the trees hadmore leaves than what was normal for her; and, the pears were not ripe and thus perhaps not ready to be picked.

Altogether five of the Spanish narrators evaluated the pears themselves at some point in their narratives. However, onlyone, S1, whose romantic and optimistic evaluation of several aspects of the film stands out (see example (3)), evaluated thepears as being de primerísima calidad (‘top quality’). By contrast, the other four (S7, S14, S19, and S20) evaluate themnegatively as ‘unripe’ (verdes) or ‘like rocks’ (como piedras), so as to suggest that the pears weren’t ready to be picked. The factthat these speakers mentioned this feature suggests that they have preexisting personal experience harvesting pears andthereforemay assume ‘‘expert power’’ (cf. Thomas, 1995:127) vis-à-vis their addresseeswith regard to this area of expertise.

S20, a middle-aged man and another member of L’s family, critiques the opening scene as having ‘rustic’ elements:

(8): 20: Bueno pues la película recuerda a un:a persona que es recogedor de fruta. Eh; tiene los correspondienteselementosperobastante rústicosparacogerla,unaescalerabuenoprimero(.)

?

sepuedecontar loque sequiera,no?

I: Como quieras.=

L: =Como quiera.

S20: Bueno primero el árbol es excesivamente grande entonces claro es poco rentable porque el subir a árboles tangrandes tiene mucho peligro.

‘S20:Okaywell thefilmreminds [you] of apersonwho is a fruitpicker.U:hhehas the correspondingyet quite rusticelements for picking it, a ladder well first (.) You can tell whatever you want, right?

I: However you want.=

L: = However.

S20:Well first tree is excessively big so of course it’s not very profitable because climbing up such big trees is verydangerous.’

S20’s description of the tree (‘excessively big. . . not very profitable. . . very dangerous’) reveals his familiarity with pear treesand even his background knowledge of the business of growing and selling pears. His negative evaluation of the tree’s sizeleads him to explain why he thinks it is too big (it’s not very profitable) and in turn, it suggests that this feature of the treecontrastedwith a desired norm. S20’s critical assessment, including his reference to ‘quite rustic elements’ for picking pears,


unveil part of the context of speaking, namely, the fact that S20 can assume ‘‘legitimate power’’ based his age and status (e.g.as a university-educated professionalwho is 10–15 years older than the addressees). Hemay also assume that he has ‘‘expertpower’’ (Thomas, 1995:127) due to his preexisting knowledge of pear trees.

7.2. Evaluation of the pearpicker’s actions

Several of the speakers evaluated the actions of the pearpicker, who is shown picking pears in opening scene of the film.Some of the most striking evaluative acts involved the speakers’ critiques of the man’s pearpicking skills. Six narratorscriticized his actions, and four of these six proceeded to give a lesson on how to pick pears correctly. Each of these segmentsof evaluation is analyzed below.

In (9), S1, a 73-year-old woman and L’s aunt (see also (3)), is prompted by L’s question,

?

Al final qué pasa. . .? (‘In the endwhat happens. . .?’), which leads to S1’s recalling and criticizing the man’s pear picking:

(9) S1: Y: (.) no recuerdo cómo ha continuao. (.)

L:

?

Al final qué pasa se van, se van cada uno por su lado y no pasa=

S1: =Sí sí.L:

?

El hombre que está en en el árbol no se da cuenta // de que le quitan las peras?

S1: El árbol, el hombre que está en el árbol baja, se le vemuymeticuloso, que lasmira, que las pone, las coge con unpocodebrusquedadporque, lasperasdeagua,hayquecogerlas concabo,porquesinosi se tiraa lomejorporelelorificio que hace el cabo puede podrirse que se dice. Pero bueno, el hombre se veía que disfrutaba cogiendo sufruto.

‘S1: A:nd (.) I don’t remember how it continued. (.)

L: In the end what happens? Do they leave, do they leave, each one in his own direction and nothing happens=

S1: =Yeah yeah.

L: Doesn’t the man who is in the tree realize // that they are taking the pears from him?

S1: The tree, themanwho is in the tree climbs down, you can see he’s verymeticulous, and he looks at them, and heputs them, he picks them a little bit abruptly because, dessert pears, you have to pick them with the stem,becauseotherwise, if youpull, theycan rotbecauseof thehole that the stemmakesso theysay.Butwell, themanyou could see that he was enjoying picking his fruit.’

S1 then gives a lesson on how to pick pears and why it is important to do it more carefully. Her evaluative statements revealher background knowledge of and previous experiencewith this activity. S1’s knowledge and rural experience enable her notonly to pass judgment on the pearpicker’s technique, but also to take advantage of the situation as a ‘teachablemoment’ withher nephew, L, who was born and raised in a city and perhaps not likely to be familiar with the details of such agriculturalactivities. Her evaluation of the man’s actions reveals that she has a predetermined script (or ‘yardstick of comparison’) forpear picking. However, she mitigates her negative criticism with a positive evaluation of the man’s demeanor at the end ofthe excerpt by adding Pero bueno, el hombre se veía que disfrutaba cogiendo su fruto (‘But well, the man you could see that hewas enjoying picking his fruit.’). With this comment, S1 seems to be trying to offset her negative appraisal of the man’sperformance so as to end her narrative on a positive note, just as she had begun it (see example (3)).

S4, a 71-year-old woman and L’s mother, opens her narrative with evaluative statements about the pearpicker’s actionsand comments on how much seeing him climb up and down the ladder worried her. Her statement is unequivocallycomparative – comparison being one of the signals of evaluation according to Thompson and Hunston (2000) – as sheexplicitly justifies her commentary by stating that she too has often gone up a ladder to pick pears. In otherwords, seeing thepearpicker up on the ladder caused her to draw a direct comparison with her own experiences picking pears:

(10) S4: Pues hijo se ve un señor que estaba cogiendo peras que amímedaba apurode verle subir por unas escaleras y semovía la escalera y digo este se cae, como tantas veces he subido yo a coger peras. Lo que sı me llamaba laatención lo mal que las cogía, porque las cogía a tirón, cosa que, o se rompe la rama del árbol, o se rompe la elmango de la pera. Eso hay que cogerlo con un pocomás de cariño, con las las manos, partiéndolas sin sin dar eltirón como la tira él, pero en fin.

‘S4:Well son you seeamanwhowaspickingpearsandseeinghimclimbuponsomerungsmademenervousandtheladder was moving and I say [to myself] this guy is going to fall, since so often I have climbed up to pick pears.What really caught my attention was how badly he picked them, because he was yanking them off, somethingthat, either you’ll break the branch of the tree, or you’ll break the stem of the pear. That you have to pickwith alittle more care, with your your hands, separating themwithout without yanking theway he pulls on it, but ohwell.’

S4’s personal account of the opening scene is both subjective and judgmental: she focuses on communicating her ownimpressions, and, like S1 (example (9)), she evaluates the way the man performed his job. She not only comments on how


poorly he picked the pears, but also why his picking was bad, and what the negative consequences of his actions could be.Then she (like her first cousin, S1) gives a lesson on how to correctly pick pears. This lesson is revealing in several ways.For one, because S4 presupposes, based on her assumptions of common ground,15 that she knows more than her son (L)about picking pears, she is in a position to express her opinion and teach a lesson. At the same time, she is able to expressher negative opinion because of the social relationship of intimacy and solidarity between her and her son (L). In general,S4’s evaluation reveals her comparison between the actions of the pearpicker and her own life experience. Examples (9)and (10) illustrate how the context of speaking places both S1 and S4 in a position of power vis-à-vis their interlocutors,in turn licensing their negative critiques, for two reasons: their age and thus legitimate power over the addressees (S1and S4 are more than 40 years older than L and I), and their greater knowledge and thus expert power based on lifeexperience.

S4 takes one last opportunity to criticize the way the man picks pears. Her negative evaluation is communicated throughher (grammatically unnecessary) use of possessive sus (‘his’) and the lexical choice, dando sus tirones (literally, ‘giving histugs/jerks’), and her verbalization of her personal reaction to this act while watching the film:

(11) S4: . . .yhanvueltopordondeelmismo, estabael señorde lasperas,dandosustironesalperalqueamímehacíadueloporque al peral hay que tratarlo como unas, las plantas hay que tratarlas como los animales y como las personas,con un poco más de delicadeza. Que me perdone el protagonista.

‘. . .and (they) returnedpastwhere the same [guy], the pearmanwas there, giving his tugs on the pear tree and itwassad to seebecause youhave to treat the pear tree like some, plants youhave to treat like animals and likepeople,witha little bit of tenderness. (I) hope the protagonist forgives me.’

Here, (as in (10)) S4 expresses her personal feelings about the man’s actions in the film. Then she gives one more lesson onhow to pick pears andmoralizes about it, oncemore revealing her preexisting script or mental model for the ‘correct’ way topick pears.

S12, a 21-year old university student (whose narrative is also cited in (6)) evaluates theman’s actions as an actor, and notas a farmer or fruit picker (. . .quisiera ser un gran actor y:. . . ‘. . .he wanted to be a great actor a:nd. . .’):

(12) S12: . . . el hombre creo que sube otra vez al árbol, sigue cogiendo peras, y las coge: yo creo que de una formaun pocotorpe, o sea las coge, las arranca:, parece que el hombre:((motioning with hand))=

L: =Que no sabe coger peras.

S12:nosabecogerperas, porque las arrancayaparte está concaraunpocodemala leche, ((Land I laugh))a lomejor esque: le pusieron allí en el video para ((laughs, then I laughs)) quisiera ser un gran actor y: ((laughs))

‘S12: . . . theman I think thathegoesupthe treeagain,hekeepspickingpears, andhep:icks themI think inaway that’sa little clumsy, that is he picks them, he ya:nks them off, it looks like the ma:n ((motioning with his hand))=

L: =Like he doesn’t know how to pick pears.

S12: doesn’t know how to pick pears, because he yanks them off and besides he’s got a sort of angry looking face, ((Land I laugh)) theyprobably put him there in the video to ((12 laughs, then I laugh)) hewanted to be a great actora:nd ((12 laughs))’

S12’s evaluation is followed by L’s collaborative summary of it, Que no sabe coger peras (‘Like he doesn’t know how to pickpears’). He too conveys that he has a preexistingmodel for pearpicking that contrastswith theway the actor in the film does it.

S14, a middle-aged (46–55-year-old) housewife and an acquaintance of the addressees, provides a scathing evaluation ofthe man’s pearpicking, but adds that he was also stealing the pears, when in fact, the film did not convey this:

(13) S14: Pues hemos visto a un señor que teníamuypocapráctica de coger fruta. Sobre- y que y que tambiénque estabarobándolá:, porque seveíaquenoera la frutadeél enelmomentoqueque la cogía conesos tironesy esas cosas.Yo así lo he visto.

‘S14:Wellwe sawaman thathad very little practice picking fruit. Above- and that and that also that hewas stealingi:t, because you could see that the fruit wasn’t his at the moment that that he picked it with those yanks andthose things. That’s the way I saw it.’

S14’s negative appraisal reveals her implicit comparison of the pearpicker’s actions with a preexistingmodel for appropriatefruit picking. Because his actionswere out of the ordinary for her and thus reportable, she also inferred that themanhad to bestealing the fruit. In other words, if the fruit had been his, he would pick it properly. The fact that this speaker comments onthe man’s having ‘very little practice picking fruit’ enables us to presuppose that she indeed does have practice (i.e. expertpower) and is thus in a position to pass judgment on the subject.

15 Herewe adopt the notion of common ground defined by Lee as an umbrella term for the information shared and used by peoplewhen they communicate

and specifically ‘‘all the knowledge/beliefs which an individual holds to be mutual/shared with another individual’’ (Lee, 2001:27).


S19, in the 46–55 age-group and a member of L’s family, also expresses disapproval of the way the man picked pears:

(14) S19: . . .El hombre, yo no soy experta en esto pero no tenía ninguna gracia cogiendo peras. ((L laughs)) Al: árbol lepegaba: u- unas sacudidas impresionantes, cuando en realidad coger peras todo elmundo sabe que hay que daruna pequeña vuelta al rabo para que se suelte s- e- e- de de una forma fácil de de la rama. Pero este hombrepegabaunos tirones impresionantes, con loque incluso se llevapartede:de las de las hojasque acompañabana:m- bueno que estaban en las ramas lógicamente.

‘S19: . . .Theman, I’mnot an expert in this but (he)wasn’t at all graceful at picking pears. ((L laughs)) Hewas giving s-some unbelievable jerks to the tree, when actually to pick pears everyone knows that you have to give a littletwist to the stem so that it comes off c- e- e- in in an easy way from from the branch. But this man was givingsomeunbelievable yanks, withwhich even part o:f of the leaves thatwerewith them comes off a:m-well theywere on branches naturally.’

S19 continues to critique the man’s actions and suggests that he may have been Mexican, basing her inference on astereotype for Mexicans. Her evaluation is laced with sarcastic humor, particularly when she notes that the man’s workwould not be too profitable given its slow pace:

(15) S19:M- este hombre, por otra parte, no tenía práctica porque las cogíamuydespacio. Amí semehaocurridopensarque si: le tuviesenquepagarporporperascogidasporhora, desde luego,no ibaa serunhombre rentableporquelas cogía con bastante parsimonia. Si esmexicano parece ser quepor aquí por lomenos se tienen la famadequelos mexicanos son bastante tranquilos, pero este hombre desde luego era muy tranquilo.

‘S19: . . .Uh- thisman, on the other hand, didn’t have any practice because he picked themvery slowly. It occurred tometo think that i:f theyhadtopayfor forpearspickedperhour, ofcourse,hewasn’tgoingtobeaveryprofitableman because he picked them quite calmly. If he’s Mexican it seems to be that over there at least Mexicans areknown to be pretty calm, but this man certainly was very calm.’

S19 continues to express her viewpoint, noting how it did not seem ‘appropriate’ for theman to put the pears in a large apronpocket, how he climbed down the ‘noisy’ ladder very ‘slowly’, and how it was hard for him to empty the pears into thebaskets:

(16) S19: Tampocomeha parecidomuy apropiado, no sé si es que por esa zona se cogen así, la formade cogerlas en esaespecie de bolso de delantal en el que las iba metiendo. Pienso que es práctico a la hora de cogerlas, perocuando bajaba las escaleras, muy despacio por cierto, unas escaleras además que iban haciendo los peldañosbastante ruidoconformeibabajandoelhombre, y lohacíaconmuypocapráctica con loquemedemuestraquetampoco era un experto, puesm: cuando llegaba abajo le costaba casi tanto comoel tiempo invertido en cogerlas peras, le costaba en sacarlas para los canastos que había de- de esparto.

‘S19:Nordid it seemveryappropriate tome, I don’t knowif it’s that in that area theyarepicked thatway, thewayofpicking the, in that kind of apron pocket inwhich hewas putting them. I think it’s practical for picking them,but when he was climbing down the ladder, very slowly by the way, a ladder besides which the rungs weremaking quite a lot of noice as themanwas going down, and he did itwith very little experiencewhich showsme that hewasn’t an expert, well u:hwhen he got down it took him almost as long as the time it took him topick the pears, it took him to empty them into the baskets of esparto grass.’

S19mitigates her criticism in examples (14–16) by prefacing it in (14) with no soy experta (‘(I) am not an expert’). It serves asboth a hedge and a strategy to avoid the appearance of ‘‘playing the expert’’ (Coates, 1996:160). However, her detailednegative evaluations of multiple aspects of the opening scene give away her assumption of expert power, i.e. thepresumption that she has substantially more knowledge of the subject matter depicted in the film than her interlocutors.

S20, a middle-agedman and familymember, also points out that the pearpicker does not know how to pick pears (see (8)for the preceding discourse):

(17) S20: . . .Luegodespués tieneunmandil, una especiedemandil, donde va cogiendo las peras de cualquiermanera esdecir no sabe coger peras ((L laughs)) porque da tirones en vez de sujetar con una mano y con la otra quitar.Entonces las va echando a esa especie de mandil, una por una con mucha parsimonia, incluso alguna vez sequita el pañuelo, un pañuelo que lleva al cuello rojo para limpiar una una pera, (.)

‘S20: . . .Thenafterwardhe has some kind of apron, where he’s gathering pears anywhichway in otherwords hedoesn’t know how to pick pears ((L laughs)) because he yanks [them] instead of holding [them] with onehand and with the other taking [them] off. So he’s tossing them into a kind of apron, one by one verycalmly, even at one point he takes off his bandana, a bandana he’s wearing around his neck in order toclean a a pear, (.). . .’


S20 continues his evaluation, noting how noisy the rungs were and how inappropriate the man’s attire was:

(18) S20: entonces pues baja con mucho cuidado, las escaleras (.) unas escaleras, bueno es una escalera bastante conunos peldaños bastante: que crujen, al al andar, no sé si los peldaños, o los zapatos que lleva, ((L and I laugh))porque realmente lleva un atuendo espectacular para coger fruta o sea unos zapatos que se puede caer encualquier momento y resbalar

?

no?

‘S20: thenwell he goes down very carefully, the ladder, (.) a ladder, well it’s a ladder [that’s] quitewith some rungs[that are] qui:te that creak,whenwalking, I don’t know if the rungs, or the shoeshe’swearing, ((L and I laugh))because really he’s wearing a spectacular outfit for picking fruit I mean some shoes that you could fall at anytime and slip, couldn’t you?’

His subsequent commentary on the slowness of the man and the largeness of the baskets suggests that these featurescontrasted what he would consider to be the norm. He then sums up his evaluation, which is also decidedly negative:

(19) S20: Entonces baja conmucha lentitud, conmucha parsimonia, y entonces empieza a sacar delmandil pe- una perauna por una, llena unos un capazo que tiene bueno tiene varios, bueno capazos en realidad son unos canastosgrandes, y va echando las peras poco a poco, hasta que la llena por encima a pa- a: llena por encima de digamosdenivel rasantedel cesto, con lo cual las peras se le caenalmenosmovimiento

?

no?Bienentonces en: definitivaesta persona coge fruta en malas condiciones y: lo hace muy despacio y mal. Para mí.

‘S20: Thenhe climbsdownvery slowly, very calmly, and thenhe starts to take out of the apronpe- onepear at a time,he fills some a basket that he has well he has several, well baskets actually they are big baskets, and he keepstossing the pears in little by little, until he fills it to the top a pa- a: he fills the basket up let’s say to the top, suchthat the pears fall with the slightest movement, right? Well so in: short this person picks fruit under badconditions a:nd he does it very slowly and badly. For me.’

S20’s consistently negative acts of evaluation are possible due to the minimal social distance between the interlocutors(family, similar educational background, etc.) and the narrator’s apparent expertise with the activity depicted in the film,which is conveyed through his detailed description.

Tannen (1980) notes that more Greeks than Americans describe the man’s pearpicking. Of the three Americans whomention it, onlyone commentsonhismovements and treatment of thepears.Her evaluation,whencomparedwith thoseof theSpanish speakers in (9) through (19), is largely objective, but ends with a positive assessment of the pearpicker’s attitude16:

(20) E12: . . .And–—uh–. . .tsk hewas picking pears. . . .Just rather slowly, and he did it. . ./so that/you could hear thesound of the pears being. . .torn from the . . .three, and he put them in an apron/that he had/,. . ./the wholeidea/he picked the pears came down the ladder,. . .put them. . .one by one. . .into this basket. . . .He. . .y yougot. . .the feeling that he pretty much liked his pears,. . .because he was so . . .gentle with them/??/.(1980:61)

The other two Americans who comment on the pearpicker’s actions focus on how the film was made, but not on thecorrectness or appropriateness of the man’s fruit picking. For instance, one of them says, ‘‘. . .the camera spends a lot of timewatching him. . . pick these pears’’ (1980:61). Another observes how slowly the man moved:

(21) E18: He’s very deliberately. . .plucking the. . . the um. . .the pears off the tree, and. . .you know you hear this. . .s—sharp little crunch as. . .as he pulls each one off, and he’s doing it. . .very slowly, and putting them in[breath] his apron. [breath]. . .tsk And then. . .climbing very carefully. . .down the. . .the ladder, and placingthem in baskets, and he’d never make it as a fruitpicker. . . .[laugh] He would starve. (1980:62)

Here, E18 sums up her evaluation of the man’s actions by focusing on his skills as an actor and not as a pearpicker. Theonly Spanish narrator to mention the fact that the pearpicker was an actor is S12 (example (12)). Interestingly, likeS12, the Americans in Tannen’s studies (1979, 1980) were also university students and ranged in age from 18 to 30. Thisobservation lends support for the hypothesis that the age and background of each speaker condition what s/he chooses toevaluate.

Tannen reports that seven Greeks describe the man’s actions picking pears. In two of the three examples she cites, theGreek speakers focus on their interpretations of pearpicker’s attitude toward the pears and his work (only the Englishtranslations are given here, but see Tannen (1980:62–63) for the original Greek versions):

(22) a. G11: (He) regarded the .eh with a piety you know the pear. Very piously.

[He looked at the pear with, you know, great piety. Very piously.]

16 Each American is labeled E (English) followed by their assigned number; each Greek speaker is labeled G followed by their number (see Tannen, 1980).


b. G12:A—ndmmtsk (it) insisted tha—t thatwhich (he)did (he) lived. . . .Thatn—inotherwords—m. . .the facttha—t (he) was cultivating the ear—th, that (he) was gathering the—se. . .the harvest,. . .was for himsomething special. . . . (It) was worth somethi—ng. . . tsk (he) lived that which he did, he liked (it).

c. G16: . . .tskA—nd(he)gathers—themlikewith. . .witha lo—teh—as if (he)wants them(tobe)hisown.Witha lot (of) li—ke/s/proprietariness (he) sh shows inside.

d. G15: His movements basically—gath. . .gathering the fruits don’t show (a) person. . .who loves them verymuch (he) pulls them very. . .(I) don’t know. . . .I didn’t like generally the way (he) was pulling them.(1980:62–63)

Tannen observes that the Greek speakers interpret the man’s feelings toward his work (in effect, his evaluation of it) andrelate those feelings to their own. She only presents one example of a Greek speaker criticizing theman’s pearpicking actions.However, she highlights the fact that the Greeks ‘‘consider it appropriate to attributemotivations and attitudes to theman aswell as to verbalize their own’’ (1980:63).

Not all of the evaluations of the pearpicker’s actions in the Spanish narratives were negative. Three Spanish speakershighlighted how he treated his pears very carefully. S6 is a 16-year-old high school student and a distant family member:

(23) S6: Pues e: es por la mañana, estamos en un campo y hay un un señor recogiendo peras en un árbol, y tiene trescestos, dos llenos y uno vacío. Entonces pue:s, las trata así con mucho cariño ?

no? las limpia y las cuidamucho,. . .

‘S6:Well u:h it’s in themorning,we’re in a field and there’s amanpickingpears in a tree, andhehas three baskets,one full one and one empty one. Thenwe:ll, he treats them that way with a lot of care, right? he cleans themand he takes good care of them,. . .’

S13, a 35–45-year-old acquaintance, offers an explanation for why the pearpicker cleans a pear with his bandana, whichcommunicates this speaker’s idealized, almost fairy tale view of the situation depicted in the film (‘. . .because (they) have tobe pretty. In his baskets.’):

(24) S13: una de ellas se le ha caído del árbol, en- se quita su pañuelo, la limpia porque tienen que estar bonitas. En suscestos.

‘S13: one of them he dropped from the tree, in- (he) takes off his bandana, (he) cleans it because (they) have to bepretty. In his baskets.’

S18, a 46–55-year-old family member, also notes that the picker treats the pears well:

(25) S18: . . . y un: campesino, que está cogiendo fruta, en este caso peras. Entonces pues está cogiendo peras, m estátratándolasmuybienporque incluso la que se le cae al suelo se quita el pañuelo, la limpia, la frota y la deja ensus canastos.

‘S18: . . .and a: farmworker, who is picking fruit, in this case pears. Sowell he’s picking pears, m he’s treating themverywellbecauseeventheone thathedrops to thegroundhe takesoff hisbandana,hecleans it,he rubs it andhe leaves it in his baskets.’

For this family member, the fact that the man cleaned a dropped pear stands out as unusual and therefore reportable, but atno time does she refer to this action negatively. By contrast, S4, an intimate family member, evaluates the same action ingreat detail and quite negatively, pointing out how it was inappropriate to use a sweaty bandana to clean a pear:

(26) S4: Luegome, sí queme ha gustado el detalle del bolsillo que llevaba, ese delantal que llevaba bolsillo y llevaba lasperasmetidas dentro. Luego al bajar, temiéndome que se rompiera la escalera, porque: el hombre se veía pesao,lashadepositao enunaun: cesto.Yyodecía ?

porqué llevaráesepanuelo, esoque lleva allíen lagarganta, esoquellevaataounacosaque le llama,queveía rojayquemellamaba laatención?Ycuandoveoquese loquita, escomounpanuelopara limpiar lapera, otra cosaqueyodigo,noparece sermuycorrecto, no llevasun trapo:propioparaeso pero, el plástico no creo que la limpiara mucho ((laughs)).

L:

?

Llevaba un plástico?S4: Sí. Y luego se la quitó y se lo ha puesto en el- y digo muy bien hecho es esto.

L:

?

Qué? ?

llevaba un plástico en el cuello y se ponía // se sería un panuelo o algo así?S4: Se llevaba un plástico como un panuelo de pico, color:(.) chorizo, el color de la tela. Y se va. . . se va. . . Se lo ha

quitado y ha limpiado una pera. Digo bien hombre, todas el sudor del cuerpo a la pera que ha ido. ((listenerlaughs))


‘S4: Later I, yes I did like the detail of the pocket that he had, that apron that had a pocket which carried the pearsinside it. Later after climbingdown, [Iwas] fearing that the ladderwould break, becau:se theman lookedheavy,hedeposited them ina a: basket. And I said [tomyself]whydoyou thinkhe’swearing that scarf, that thing thereat his throat, that thing he’s got tied there a thing that calls, that I could see [that was] red that caught myattention? And when I see that he takes it off, it’s like a scarf for cleaning the pear, another thing that I say, itdoesn’t seemveryproper, youdon’twear a ra:g that’s appropriate for that but, theplastic thing I don’t think thatit could have cleaned much ((laughs))

L: Was he wearing a plastic thing?

S4: Yes. And then he took it off and he put it on the- and I say this is just great.

L:What?hewaswearingaplastic thingaroundhisneckandhestarted // itwawasprobablya scarfor something likethat?

S4: Hewaswearing a plastic thing like a bandana, the color o:f (.) chorizo, the color of the fabric. And he goes. . . andhegoes. . .Hetook itoffandhecleanedapear. I saywelldoneman.All the sweat fromyourbodyhasgonestraightonto the pear.’

The excerpt in (25) is produced by a family member who shares little common ground and thus less solidarity with heraudience (L and me) due to differences in age (of 15–20 years), education (elementary versus university), and professionalbackground (ama de casa ‘housewife/homemaker’ versuswhite-collar, professional). She gives a brief and positive account oftheman cleaning a dropped pear, which contrasts starklywith the account of the same event, by S4 (example (26)), who is anintimate family member (L’s mother). Her speech is loaded with evaluative statements regarding how inappropriate theman’s actions were. Why were these two accounts so different? These two examples illustrate a general tendency observedin the data (albeit with a few exceptions), namely, that speakers whose relationshipwith Lwas one of intimacy (e.g. S4), or ofsolidarity (based on like-mindedness, similarities in age and/or education) and relative closeness due to family ties (e.g. S1,S7, S11, S12, S19, and S20) produced substantiallymore evaluative statements in their narratives and includedmore notablynegative evaluations of both the pearpicker’s actions and the setting than did the other speakers, whose relationship to Lwasmore distant (distant relatives and acquaintances).

8. Conclusions

A central notion in Mey’s theory of pragmatic acts is affordability, which refers to what a speaker can do, say, andunderstand in a particular context, as well as what the situation itself can afford. By analyzing acts of evaluation in theSpanish pear film narratives, we have observed how the evaluations that are ‘affordable’ in the film narratives are directlytied to, and thus constrained by, three factors: (1) the relationship of social distance between the narrators on the one handand the addressees (the listener and me) on the other, as measured by intimacy and solidarity, along a continuum rangingfrom a relationship of intimate family, to family, to distant family and acquaintance; (2) the ‘power’ relationship between theinterlocutors based on the speaker’s knowledge and experience relative to that of his/her interlocutors, such that speakerswithmore background knowledge, experience, and greater expertise are in a position to evaluate and pass judgment; and (3)how salient the element (person, action, object being evaluated) is for the speaker as determined by how unexpected it is orhow much it contrasts with the speaker’s preconceived norm. The data reveal that when the narrator and his/herinterlocutors (the listener and investigator) shared roughly equal status or power in terms of their relationship of solidarity(e.g. of familiarity, intimacy, like-mindedness, common ground, and similar experience/knowledge), the narrator evaluatedmore and in greater detail than did narrators of unequal status (i.e. unequal ‘power’, based on differences of age and socialstatus and/or of knowledge or expertise), who were also socially distant (non-solidary, less familiar, not socially close).Additionally, those narratorswith a relationship of solidaritywith the interlocutors, butwho alsowere in a position of poweron account of being more experienced and knowledgeable about specific elements in the film, were licensed to (i.e. found itfar more ‘affordable’ to) negatively evaluate and pass judgment on those elements.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Alessandro Capone for hismany helpful suggestions for revision and his encouragement and supportduring the writing of this paper. Also, many thanks to two anonymous referees for providing very constructive feedback onearlier versions of the paper.

Appendix A. Characteristics of the Spanish narrators

Subject # Age Sex Origin/lives in Education Profession or parents’ profession Relation to listener

S1 75 F Maleján Elementary Housewife Family

S2 73 F Maleján Elementary Housewife Distant family

S3 71 F Maleján Elementary Housewife Family


Appendix A (Continued )

Subject # Age Sex Origin/lives in Education Profession or parents’ profession Relation to listener

S4 73 F Maleján Elementary Housewife Intimate family

5S 16 F Maleján H.S. student Farmer/housewife Acquaintance

S6 16 F Maleján H.S. student Farmer/teacher Distant family

S7 18 F Maleján H.S. student H.S. teacher/H.S. teacher Family

S8 16 F Maleján H.S. student Worker/housewife Acquaintance

S9 17 F Maleján H.S. student Farmer/teacher Distant family

S10 35 F Maleján/Alicante Elementary Seamstress Family

S11 38 M Borja/Alicante Technical school Industrial electrician Family

S12 21 M Maleján/Zaragoza University student Teacher/teacher Family

S13 35–45 F Maleján High school Lab. technician Acquaintance

S14 46–55 F Maleján Elementary Housewife Acquaintance

S15 46–55 F Zaragoza Elementary Housewife Acquaintance

S16 46–55 M Zaragoza High school Lathe operator Acquaintance

S17 46–55 F Maleján Elementary Housewife Acquaintance

S18 46–55 F Maleján Elementary Housewife Family

S19 46–55 F Maleján University H.S. teacher Family

S20 46–55 M Maleján University H.S. teacher Family

Appendix B. Transcription conventions

Most of the conventions used to transcribe the Spanish narratives are taken from Levinson (1983:369–370). Levinsonnotes (1983:369) that many of these were developed by Gail Jefferson and others.

// point at which the current utterance is overlapped by that transcribed below

(.) pause–—potentially significant but short

: lengthened syllables

:: longer lengthened syllables

- glottal stop self-editing marker

= = latched utterances with no gap

?

? punctuation marks for questions

? rising pitch

. used to indicate falling intonation contour

, used to indicate maintained (‘continuing’) intonation contour

(( )) used to specify ‘some phenomenon that the transcriber does not want to wrestle with’ or somenon-vocal action, e.g. ((doorbell rings))

( ) uncertain passages of the script

CAPS words or syllables stressed by amplitude, pitch or duration

Appendix C. Elements of the pear film evaluated by Spanish narrators

OPENING SCENE (SETTING): S1, S7, S15, S16, S17, S19, S20

FILM QUALITIES:

Sound: S12 (muy marcado(‘very marked’), bicycle describes ‘‘un terremoto’’ (‘an earthquake’))

Pearpicker’s bad acting: S12

Lack of dialogue and interaction in film: S12

PEARPICKER

Pearpicker’s role, ethnicity: S1, S7, S19

Relationship between the boy and pearpicker: S1, S16

Pear tree: S19 (too leafy), S20 (too big, not lucrative)

Pears: S1 (top quality), S7 (unripe), S14 (like rocks), S19 (unripe), S20 (made noise)

Pearpicker’s appearance: S4 (bandana), S10 (heavy), S17 his (look, bandana), S20

Pearpicker’s apron: S3 (big pocket), S4 (big pocket)


Pearpicker’s slow and clumsy movements on ladder and pace: S4, S10, S20

Pearpicker’s careful treatment of pears: S5, S6, S18,

Explanation for/evaluation of why picker cleaned the dropped pear: S7, S13, S17,

Evaluation and criticism of picker’s pearpicking: S1, S4, S12, S14, S19, S20

Lesson on how to pick pears correctly: S1, S4, S19, S20

Evaluation of cleaning the pear with his bandana as inappropriate: S4

Evaluation of pearpicker’s not noticing anything: S11 (deaf or stupid), S17,

MAN AND GOAT

Absence of a greeting/dialogue between picker and man passing with a goat

S1, S6. S11

Evaluation of goat’s behavior: S2 (prudente); S8 (no hizo nada), S18 (correcto)

THEFT

Size of the bike relative to boy: S7, S12 (too big)

Boy’s personal thoughts (constructed dialogue or modals): S3, S5, S6, S10, S13, S15, S19

Addition of details not in the film to create a better story: S3

Ease with which the boy lifted the basket: S1, S15, S19 (illogical)

Difficulty lifting the basket, riding the bike with the pears: S7, S12, S17

Theft as a blatant act: S11, S12, S19

Theft as morally wrong: S2, S18,

ACCIDENT

Attributing the accident to looking at the girl and not seeing the rock

S1, S2, S7, S13, S14, S16, S17, 19 (logical), S20 (lo de siempre—stereotypical)

Dirt road is bad: S11, S20

THREE BOYS HELPING BIKE BOY

Evaluation of boys’ role: S2 (vagamundos [sic] ‘vagabonds’), S7 (matones, ‘thugs’), S8 (unos amigos, ‘some friends’),S12 (tres matones, ‘three thugs’), S20 (una padilla, ‘a group/gang’)

Three boys’ helping the bike boy: S2 (muy amables), S19 (acto de generosidad),

Constant playing with the paddleball: S4, S17

Basket of pears was much heavier for the two boys to lift than for bike boy: S15

Lack of interaction or dialogue: he didn’t say anything to them: S9

Boy returning the hat: S12 (líder)

PEAR EXCHANGE

Criticism of bike boy’s not thanking the three boys right away by giving them pears

S1, S13 (no ha caído), S18, S19, S20Positive evaluation of bike boy’s giving the pears as thanks: S1, S14

ENDING

Boys’ demeanor when walking: S3 (tranquilos)

Pearpicker’s thoughts when three boys pass by:

S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S8 (constructed monologue), S9 (se mosquea, ‘gets annoyed’), S10, S11, S12 (asombrao‘astonished’, pensativo ‘pensive’, tonto del pueblo ‘town fool’); S14, S15(extrañao ‘surprised’), S17 (se queda mosqueao ‘he’s annoyed’), S18, S19

Lack of conversational interaction inappropriate: S3,

Man didn’t say anything because he was stealing pears too: S14

MORAL LESSONS

Why we should be grateful for the simple things in life: S1

Judgment of the bike boy’s stealing as morally bad: S2


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Sarah Blackwell is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia. She has research and teaching interests inSpanish pragmatics and semantics, conversation and discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, dialectology and applied linguistics. She is the author of Implicatures inDiscourse: The Case of Spanish NP Anaphora (John Benjamins, 2003) and her articles have appeared in Hispania, Journal of Pragmatics, Spanish in Context andPragmatics and Language Learning. Her research has focused on the interaction of cognitive, social, pragmatic, and semantic factors in narrative production andinterpretation, and most recently, on framing and metapragmatic reflection in Spanish narrative discourse and on the acquisition of rules for the use of null andovert subjects by L2 speakers of Spanish.


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Evaluation as a Pragmatic Act in Spanish Film Narratives