Seguimos con la actualidad . . . The first-person plural nosotros ‘we’ across Spanish media genres
- 12 September 2013
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Discourse & Communication
- Vol. 7 (4), 409-433
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481313494437
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to analyze Spanish first-person plural subjects as a cognitively grounded grammatical choice serving various discursive functions. Both the expressed and omitted variants of the subject will be considered, even if omission is by far the more frequent choice in Spanish and the more communicatively versatile one. The particularly vague reference of omitted nosotros ‘we’ – always involving an extension of the self towards a wider notional scope – results in a remarkable variety of possible contextual projections. It can be used to signal speaker identities as well as manage interpersonal relationships through the iconic suggestion of viewpoint coincidence. First-person plural clauses are quantitatively and qualitatively investigated across two corpora of contemporary Spanish comprising a variety of spoken and written genres. It is found that, aside from the basic distinction between hearer-exclusive and hearer-inclusive first persons, a third, intermediate variant can be considered, that of empathic hearer-exclusive uses. These are typical of interactions where involvement of the audience is sought even if they are not referentially included in the subject, as is usual in some varieties of spoken mass-media discourse. Each one of the referential variants is used with different frequencies and contextual repercussions, depending on the socio-functional demands and goals of particular textual genres.Keywords
This publication has 18 references indexed in Scilit:
- Why we can be you: The use of 1st person plural forms with hearer reference in English and SpanishJournal of Pragmatics, 2011
- Spanish subject pronoun usage and verb semantics revisited: First and second person singular subject pronouns and focusing of attention in spoken Peninsular SpanishJournal of Pragmatics, 2011
- Syntactic variation and communicative styleLanguage Sciences, 2011
- Variation across texts and discourses: Theoretical and methodological perspectives on text type and genrePublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,2010
- IntroductionPublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,2010
- Las bases cognitivas del estilo lingüísticoSociolinguistic Studies, 2010
- On how we interpret plural pronounsJournal of Pragmatics, 2010
- Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversationLanguage Variation and Change, 2007
- Spoken and written register variation in Spanish: A multi-dimensional analysisCorpora, 2006
- Indexicality and deixisLinguistics and Philosophy, 1993