Graciela Reyes
Professor of Spanish
(312) 996 8522
grareyes@uic.edu
Click Here for CV

I am interested in the grammatical description of Spanish, in the theoretical principles of Pragmatics, in different types of communicative phenomena, and in literary communication from a pragmatic pespective.

In the years following my Ph.D. dissertation, where I studied how the written press converts linguistic events into news, I completed a description of the linguistic, ideological, generic and literary aspects of the textual representation of linguistic action. In Polifonía textual (1984) I analized reported speech in literary narrative, and later, in a series of articles, I dealt with the grammatical properties of Spanish that correlate with citative functions, specially tense and mood.

My interest in textual phenomena brought me naturally to the theoretical discussions of a developing discipline, Pragmatics. In La pragmática lingüística (1990) I tried to offer a comprehensive account of Pragmatics, with a focus on inferencial models of communication.. I included in my discussion the pragmatic treatment of figures of speech and the possible application of pragmatic principles to the problems of literary interpretation.

I have a strong interest in all types of written texts. My book on Spanish composition (Manual de Redacción, 1998) reflects my theoretical and practical concerns in the study of language, my central interest for the teaching of Spanish, and also my experience as a writer.

At present, I am working on metapragmatics, the study of the more or less conscious competence about the use of language, and its manifestations in grammar. In my book Metapragmática (forthcoming) I will reanalyze some of the topics of my previous research, such as reported speech and irony, from the point of view of metapragmatic awareness, and I will examine the role of metalinguistic communication in recent pragmatic theories.

I teach Spanish grammar, Introduction to linguistics, Linguistic models in literary theory, Discourse analysis, and Pragmatics and metapragmatics. I am supervising doctoral dissertations on the following topics: metaphor in conversation; irony; linguistic politeness; personal deictics; mass media language; and modality in Spanish.





Publications:

Polifonía textual. La citación en el relato literario (1984).
La pragmática lingüística. El estudio del uso del lenguaje (1990).
Los procedimientos de cita. Estilos directos e indirectos (1993).
Citas encubiertas y ecos. (1994). El abecé de la pragmática (1996, 1998, 2000).
Manual de redacción. Cómo escribir bien en español (1998).
Ejercicios de pragmática (with E. Baena and E. Urios); 2000).
Metapragmática. Lenguaje sobre lenguaje, ficciones, figuras (forthcoming)

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