This unit introduces students to the elemental greetings in Spanish, to nationalities and professions, enabling them to be able to give basic information about themselves and ask other people for the same. They are also introduced to subject pronouns and the present tense of ser and of reflexive verbs.

This unit introduces students to the elemental greetings in Spanish, to nationalities and professions, enabling them to be able to give basic information about themselves and ask other people for the same. They are also introduced to subject pronouns and the present tense of ser and of reflexive verbs.

The opening sequence is a delicate phase of any conversation. Through ritualized acts, interlocutors come into contact, reveal their respective stances toward each other and prepare themselves to broach the first topic of the discussion. Their positioning in the opening sequence influences the subsequent phases of the interaction. An integrated pragmatic approach that combines Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory and Im/Politeness Research is well-suited to studying this communicative stage in its complexity.

This chapter examines the opening phase in the dialogues of Menander’s comedy from such a perspective. After showing that, in Menander’s Athens, conversational openings follow rules analogous to those in our society, it then demonstrates how Menander exploits the social delicateness of the phase. Clear patterns in the development of Menandrean conversational openings are identified, which are linked to the communicative situation as well as to the speakers’ state of mind and relationship. Finally, the chapter discusses how in Dyskolos the poet plays with im/politeness in conversational openings to characterize the protagonist, structure the plot and generate humour.

Whenever two or more people meet and begin to communicate, subtle or not-so-subtle changes in speech patterns may emerge as a result – including switches to a different language, shifts in pronunciation, speech rate and utterance lengths, as well as non-verbal behaviours. Communication Accommodation Theory deals with interlocutors’ motivations for becoming linguistically more alike or less alike as well as their motivations for not changing their speech at all. As conation constitutes one of the components of language attitudes, these communicative strategies are considered to reflect – at least to a certain extent – the attitudes that interlocutors hold towards each other and their respective social groups. This chapter discusses how analysing communication accommodation as an indicator of language attitudes comes with both strengths (e.g. it reflects actual language use in daily communicative practice) and limitations (e.g. the remaining uncertainty of how affect and conation interact). Key practical issues of planning and research design are addressed, such as the all-important mitigation of the observer’s paradox, which may, by itself, trigger accommodation. The chapter then discusses the analysis of data resulting from communication accommodation studies. It concludes with a case study of communication accommodation between French and English speakers in Quebec’s urban centre, Montreal.