Seguimos con la actualidad . . . The first-person plural nosotros ‘we’ across Spanish media genres

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.

The participants as objects: Variation And Meaning Of First‐ And Second‐Person Object Encoding In Spanish

“…This person is especially complex in its referential variability according to the context; the speaker can use it to index human pluralities where he/she is included, but the addressee or audience may be or not. Serrano & Aijón Oliva (:412, 419) observe that the expression of nosotros / as as a subject is generally associated with more specific groups, and particularly with those excluding the audience (see also Posio :342–343). The tendency is perhaps not so clear with objects, but at least 20 of the 32 cases obtained are clearly audience‐exclusive.…”

Not so ‘innocent’ after all? Exploring corporate identity construction online

“…Pollach, 2005; Van de Mieroop, 2007). It is, in fact, one of the strategies through which relationship claims are uttered and thereby constructed between the company and its website users (Fuertes-Olivera et al, 2001; Pollach, 2005; Serrano and Aijón Oliva, 2013). In this section, we focus on the use of pronouns in relation to innocent ’s claims of a ‘family’ identity.…”

“…The first person plural pronoun ‘we’ is particularly complex as it can be used as an audience inclusive, audience exclusive or impersonal pronoun (e.g. Serrano and Aijón Oliva, 2013), and its reference can shift, sometimes within the same sentence. The ways it is used and the meanings it conveys on the ‘us’ webpage are particularly interesting as they challenge some of the identity claims the company makes on this page.…”

Social Actors “to Go”: An Analytical Toolkit to Explore Agency in Business Discourse and Communication

“…Pronouns, in general, are "indexical markers that anchor language in the real world" (Verschueren, 1999, p. 18), but their referents can be ambiguous, and therefore their interpretation depends greatly on the context of the text. As attested by scholarship (De Cillia, Reisigl, & Wodak, 1999;Kuo, 1999;Serrano & Oliva, 2013;Lammers, 2001as cited in van de Mieroop, 2009, we can refer to many aspects of reality, but it usually does so in a nonobvious way. The following list and Figure 7 give an overview of the various ways in which we can be used:…”