ABSTRACT
This chapter examines pragmatic variation (Barron & Schneider, 2009; Schneider & Barron, 2008) according to gender during service encounters in a rural Nicaraguan community of practice (Wenger, 1998). Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the study focuses on variation in the stylistic domain, analyzing the use of address forms by vendor and customer during corner-store interactions. The analysis includes the use of vocatives, such as amigo ‘friend’ and amor ‘love,’ and pronouns of address (vos, tú, usted ‘you’). Data stem from 81 vendor-customer interactions at the community’s busiest corner store. Results suggest that address form selection by both vendor and customer was primarily conditioned by customer gender, with significantly more usted used during interactions with female customers, and vos with male customers. Request type is also shown to have influenced pronoun selection, but only among female customers. Use of tú is discussed in light of the community’s evolving sociocultural norms tied to tourism-driven dialect/culture contact. A pragmatic-discursive perspective (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015) informs discussion of the functions of pronoun selection, alternation, and switching.
