Defocusing and the third-person viewpoint: the pronoun uno and its covariation with clitic se in Spanish
- Autores: María José Serrano Montesinos
- Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 280, 2022
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
The use of the Spanish pronoun uno is meaningful as it allows for defocusing the agent, experiencer or initiator of the action. It is assumed to appear in communicative situations in combination with other linguistic elements, with the aim of constructing a third-person discursive viewpoint. The discursive viewpoint has been ascertained by the observation of the covariation of uno with other defocusing resources in a varied range of texts: debates, conversations, interviews, reports, magazines, talk shows and news. Such resources, considered as space builders, were the following: cuando, si, (la) gente (when, if, people) and the clitic se. The analysis reveals that the clitic se is the most frequent one that covariates with uno to perform a desubjectivizing style in discourse. Three references of uno were isolated; these were shaped by the gradual presence of clitic se in the clauses of the immediate context, as these create a desubjectivizing context in which uno is more likely to appear. However, a detailed analysis of the combination of se and uno in different texts indicates that the frequency of se varies according to uno’s references, and also to the kind of text in which uno appears.
