Manuel Padilla Cruz

I am an Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics. I teach undergraduate courses in English as a second language and for the Tourism Industry, and graduate courses in pragmatics and discourse analysis, and translation. I have also taught several courses in English phonetics and phonology, dialectology or history of the English language, among others. Currently, I am the head of the research group "Intercultural studies (English-Spanish): Pragmatic and discourse issues", which organises the biennial International Symposium on Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics, also widely known after their acronym (EPICS). 

My research deals with pragmatics. Although most of it adopts a relevance-theoretic standpoint, it also relies on politeness and sociopragmatic theory. I have looked into compliments, complaints, greetings, interjections, phatic communion, expressive expletives, qualifying insults, offensive epithets, slurs or evidential participles. I have also been interested in (im)politeness and done some work in the area of historical pragmatics. Pragmatic failure and misunderstandings have always intrigued me, as well as the communicative problems of learners of L2 English. Research in the latter has resulted in some pedagogical proposals aiming at overcoming their deficits and developing their pragmatic competence. Over the past few years, my attention has turned to the effects of epistemic vigilance and hermeneutical vigilance on comprehension and, more specifically, joke and pun comprehension. More recently, I have started to analyse how humour works in some contexts and incorporated insights from pragmatics to the branch of philosophy known as social epistemology in order to shed some light onto issues like epistemic injustices or venting.

Some of my publications can be found and downloaded here:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Manuel_Padilla_Cruz/research

https://us.academia.edu/ManuelPadillaCruz