Perspectival factors and pro-drop: A corpus study of speaker/addressee pronouns with creer ‘think/ believe’ and saber ‘know’ in spoken Spanish

Abstract

This paper examines overt and covert speaker/addressee pronouns with the cognitive verbs creer ‘think/believe’ and saber ‘know’ in a corpus of spoken peninsular Spanish – the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014– ) – with a focus on 1st person singular (yo) creo que ‘(I) think that’. Departing from the observation made in the literature that overt pronouns are highly frequent with creer and that topic shift cannot account for all of them, it will be argued that perspectival factors related to evidentiality/epistemicity and subjectivity influence overt pronoun realization. A corpus study was conducted to investigate whether (i) [person] and [polarity] and (ii) the type of complement affect overt pronoun realization with the cognitive verbs creer and saber. The results indicate that the type of belief expressed in the embedded clause should be taken into account, as well as person and polarity. The ultimate trigger for phonetic realization of speaker/addressee pronouns will be argued to be the notion of contrast: cognitive verbs whose embedded complement encodes evaluations and non-visual, abstract information have high frequencies of overt pronoun realization because these contexts favor the evoking of alternative perspective holders. Overt pronouns will be analyzed as the result of a [+contrast] feature which is assigned to the specifier of a functional category encoding perspective in the split IP.

Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages

“…This issue takes us to one of the main issues of the present volume: the question of what the factors governing subject expression are in the case of reference to discourse participants and whether they differ from those that have been observed to hold for discourse anaphoric persons. In fact, for devices expressing reference to the speaker, it has been argued that, rather than continuity, subjectivity is a major factor for the use of an implicit or explicit subject pronoun (see, e.g., Enríquez 1984, Aijón Oliva & Serrano 2010, Posio 2011, 2018, Hennemann 2016, Herbeck 2021.…”

“…To use the file card metaphor (Reinhart 1981, Heim 1982, the cards for the speaker and addressee are always on top of the file and, thus, available as topics (Erteschik-Shir 2007: 45-46). For firstperson pronominal forms, it has therefore been argued that, apart from topic and referential continuity, factors in determining subject pronoun expression include subjectivity and the epistemic stance of the speaker (see, e.g., Enríquez 1984, Aijón Oliva & Serrano 2010, Posio 2011, Herbeck 2021, probably depending on the type of verb lexeme or individual verb forms. For address forms in morphological second and third person, use of a subject pronoun or noun phrase is governed by factors related to formality of the discourse, (positive and negative) politeness and (inter)personal relations between the interlocutors (see De Jonge & Nieuwenhuijsen 2012 and Uber 2016 for an overview and references).…”