ABSTRACT
In the realm of pragmatics and discourse-related phenomena (henceforth, pragmatics only), research on Spanish as a heritage language is still in the developing stage, and, as a whole, remains somewhat unfocused and inconsistent. While certain topics such as speech acts and discourse markers have surfaced in multiple studies, other areas continue to be under investigated. For the most part, the examination of the speech behavior of bilingual and multilingual speech communities from a pragmatic perspective has not developed as rapidly as the interdisciplinary fields of Interlanguage Pragmatics, involving the study of second-language learners, or Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, the comparison of two or more speech communities. Although neither field has necessarily excluded bilingual groups as a subject of study, their inclusion has not been the norm. Nevertheless, if one considers bilingual and multilingual contexts involving different languages, there has still been a steady trickle of studies over the past few decades dealing with topics such as speech acts, discourse markers, and politeness (Barnes, 2001; Blum-Kulka, 1990; Blum-Kulka & Sheffer, 1993; Clyne, 1979; Clyne, Ball, & Neil, 1991; Hlavac, 2006; Farghal & Haggan, 2006; Marti, 2006). More recently, with the increase of attention in linguistics dedicated to bilingualism and multilingualism, it is likely that pragmatic research focusing on languages in contact will continue to develop.
