Cover not available
Part of
It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research
Edited by Bettina Kluge and María Irene Moyna
[Topics in Address Research 1] 2019
► pp. 281–304

The variable functions of addressing hearer-participants with Spanish second person object forms in media discourse

The Spanish second person singular and plural objects te/a ti (‘you/to you’ 2sg), le/a usted (‘you/to you’ 2sg), and les/a ustedes (‘you/to you’ 2pl) can be used to address hearer-participants (hearers and addressees) in audiovisual mass media, radio and television. Hearers and addressees are two categories that can be pragmatically isolated. This investigation analyzes these two functions in a corpus of contemporary Spanish (Corpus Interaccional del Español) as a case of syntactic variation. Variants serve to accomplish different communicative goals across genres, socio-professional affiliations, and sex/gender of speakers. They will be studied by means of the cognitive notions of salience and informativeness. Results indicate that there exist meaningful differences in how these functions are performed by people belonging to different social categories and also that they create diverse communicative styles based on the objectivity gradual cognitive dimension.
Keywords: discourse, informativeness, media, salience, second person, Spanish, style
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus and methodology
  • 3.Expression and omission of second person singular and plural objects
  • 4.Addressing hearer-participants by 2sg and 2pl objects: A socio-situational distribution
    • 4.1Distribution across textual genres
    • 4.2Distribution of functions by socio-professional affiliations and sex/gender of speaker
  • 5.Towards a communicative style by indexing hearer-participants in media texts
  • 6.Conclusions and prospects
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tar.1.11ser
References (39)
References
Aijón Oliva, Miguel Ángel. In press. The coherence between functional patterns and cognitive construction: Spanish usted and ustedes as displaced second persons. Hispanic Studies Review.
Aijón Oliva, Miguel Ángel & María José Serrano. 2010. Las bases cognitivas del estilo lingüístico. Sociolinguistic Studies 4 (1). 115–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. Style in syntax. Investigating variation in Spanish pronoun subjects. Frankfurt (Main): Peter Lang.Google Scholar
. 2014. Moving towards the realm of the other: Second-person objectivization in Spanish media discourse. Language Sciences 45.173–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. A matter of style: Gender and subject variation in Spanish. Gender and Language 10 (2). 240–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing noun phrase antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Athanasiadou, Angeliki, Costas Canakis & Bert Cornillie (eds.). 2006. Subjectification: Various paths to subjectivity. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bell, Alan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13. 145–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. & Thomas B. Carlson. 1982. Hearers and speech acts. Language 58 (2). 322–373. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clayman, Steven E. & John Heritage. 2002. The news interviews. Journalists and public figures on the air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clayman, Steven E. & Tania Romaniuk. 2011. Questioning candidates. In Matts Ekström & Mariana Patrona (eds.), Talking politics in broadcast media: Cross-cultural perspectives on political interviewing, journalism and accountability, 15–32. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croft, William & Alan D. Cruse. 2004. Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Beaugrande, Robert A. & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 1997. Introducción a la lingüística del texto. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar
De Cock, Barbara. 2014. Profiling participants in discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Smedt, Eva & Kristel Vandenbrande. 2011. Political television formats as strategic resources in achieving journalists’ roles. In Matts Ekström & Mariana Patrona (eds.), Talking politics in broadcast media: Cross-cultural perspectives on political interviewing, journalism and accountability, 75–92. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duszak, Anna. (ed.) 2002. Us and others. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic variation as social practice. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope & John Rickford (eds.). 2001. Style and sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita (ed.). 2013. The pragmatics of political discourse: Explorations across cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, Anita & Gerda Lauerbach (eds.). 2007. Political discourse in the media: Cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
García, Erica C. 2009. The motivated syntax of arbitrary signs: Cognitive constraints on Spanish clitic clustering. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 2005. Le discours en interaction. Paris: Armand Colin.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2006. Subjectification, grammaticization and conceptual archetypes. In Angeliki Athanasiadou, Costas Canakis & Bert Cornillie (eds.), Subjectification: Various paths to subjectivity, 17–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009. Investigations in cognitive grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maltz, Daniel N. & Ruth A. Borker. 2011. A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication. In Jennifer Coates & Pia Pichler (eds.), Language and gender: A reader, 487–502. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Montgomery, John. 2007. The discourse of the broadcast news. A linguistic approach. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mühlhäusler, Peter & Rom Harré. 1990. Pronouns and people. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Nevala, Minna. 2010. Keeping up appearances: Facework in self- and addressee-oriented person reference. In Jonathan Culpeper & Dániel Zoltán Kádár (eds.), Historical impoliteness, 147–174. Frankfurt (Main): Peter Lang.Google Scholar
O’Keeffe, Anne. 2006. Investigating media discourse. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rampton, Ben. 2006. Language in late modernity. Interaction in an urban school. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, David, Sali Tagliamonte & John Smith. 2012. GoldVarb Lion: a multivariate analysis application for Macintosh. University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Serrano, María José. 2011. Sociolingüística. Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal.Google Scholar
. 2012. El sujeto pronominal usted/ustedes y su posición: variación y creación de estilos comunicativos. Spanish in Context 9 (1). 109–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Serrano, María José & Miguel Ángel Aijón Oliva. 2013. Seguimos con la actualidad. The omission of nosotros ‘we’ across Spanish media genres. Discourse & Communication 7 (4). 409–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swann, Joan. 2011. Yes, but is it gender? In Jennifer Coates & Pia Pichler (eds.), Language and gender: A reader, 551–568. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Theodoropoulou, Irene. 2014. Sociolinguistics of style and social class in contemporary Athens. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uehara, Satoshi. 2006. Toward a typology of linguistic subjectivity: A cognitive and cross-linguistic approach to grammaticalized deixis. In Angeliki Athanasiadou, Costas Canakis & Bert Cornillie (eds.), Subjectification: Various paths to subjectivity, 75–117. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Chornet, Daniel
2022. “People confuse respeto ‘respect’ with terms of address”: an analysis of online metacommunication about politeness and second-person pronoun use in Peninsular Spanish. Journal of Politeness Research 18:2 ► pp. 311 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.