We shed light on the question of how narrow information (F) and contrastive focus (CF) are intonationally and syntactically realized by heritage speakers (HSs) of Peninsular Spanish (PS) who have German as their second L1, and compare their data to those of monolingual speakers (MSs) of PS. Results from a production experiment show clear differences between the groups with respect to preferred syntactic strategies and, consequently, the intonational realization of focal pitch accents. The preferred strategy of HSs is stress shift, followed by p-movement and simple clefts, for both focus types. Conversely, MSs mostly use different strategies for each focus type; that is, pseudo-clefts and p-movement for F, and simple clefts and focus fronting for CF. Interestingly, stress shift is not a relevant option. The attested differences support the view that the interface between discourse on one hand, and syntax and phonology on the other, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Sorace, 2011).

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch’s chapter aims to throw light on emic understandings of face1 and imagen1 in Peninsular Spanish, and to compare such understandings with etic approaches to imagen and identity. A three-pronged methodology is used to tease out lay meanings of imagen from different first-order sources, and includes the examination of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, the analysis of a corpus of Spanish newspapers, and the analysis of data from focus groups discussing situated experiences of imagen1. The results show that imagen1 and face1 are not related in a straightforward manner. Whereas imagen2 draws on Goffman’s and Brown and Levinson’s seminal definitions of the construct, imagen1 does not always evoke imagen2; when it does, it is more closely related to Goffman’s than to Brown and Levinson’s conception.Microanalysis of naturally-occurring discourse focusing on experiences of imagen1 shows how uses of imagen1 pointed to the centrality of identity and its relationship with face1. The author’s findings thus give credence to that fact that face and identity co-constitute each other and are hard to separate theoretically and analytically.

Culpeper, O’Driscoll and Hardaker’s chapter probes into British people’s understandings of politeness and contrasts them with the understandings of people in North America. Such overarching generalisations, the authors argue, are commonly found in lay persons’ assessments of politeness and thus constitute fertile ground for studies of metapragmatic politeness. Furthermore, the results of a survey of studies focusing on either British culture or North American culture as reified entities indicated a scarcity of emic studies of these cultures in the field of politeness. The authors’ study aims to fill this gap. To that end, they apply corpus linguistic tools to the Oxford English Corpus and subject to scrutiny the lexeme ‘polite’ and the associated clusters of collocates. The results are then triangulated with geolocated Twitter data. Findings partly support both the British and the North American politeness stereotypes, but also show that, contrary to expectations, friendliness and involvement are an important feature of understandings of politeness in both the UK and the USA.