Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

Pragmatics concerns the study of meanings in different communicative settings and situations. These emerge from the use of linguistic constructions by participants, whose social features play an important role in creating and shaping meanings according to their communicative purposes and cultural values. Hence, it is evident that there exist essential links between pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The former cannot adequately address its scope without considering its social and cultural counterpart, whereas the latter should examine the distribution of pragmatic meanings across the social spectrum and adequately account for it. Both frameworks view language use as a consequence of social, cultural, and communicative values. This chapter examines how the construction of pragmatic meaning in the study of the Spanish language has included sociolinguistic explanations and approaches. It describes the methodologies and concepts employed and reviews those variable phenomena that most clearly evidence the interplay between pragmatics and sociolinguistics.