Entre lo impersonal y lo individual

Abstract

La presente investigación compara las estrategias de impersonalización individualizadoras en el español peninsular y en el portugués europeo. Dichas estructuras incluyen pronombres y formas verbales como la segunda persona del singular y el pronombre indefinido-impersonal uno. La comparación entre español y portugués resulta interesante, ya que esta última lengua no dispone de un pronombre análogo a uno y el uso de la segunda persona del singular se demuestra limitado. En cambio, en el portugués europeo se emplea el sintagma nominal a/uma pessoa para expresar referencia impersonal. Un análisis cuantitativo de entrevistas sociolingüísticas demuestra que la expresión de la impersonalidad individual es más frecuente en español que en portugués. Aunque las estrategias de impersonalización nominales del portugués presentan indicios de gramaticalización, su uso no es tan generalizado como el del tú impersonal en español. Las diferencias observadas pueden relacionarse con factores culturales como la expresión de cortesía positiva y negativa.

A pessoa and uma pessoa: Grammaticalization and functions of a human impersonal referential device in European Portuguese

“…In contrast, the impersonal or generic use of the second-person singular is very frequent in Peninsular Spanish, while its use in EP is more restricted. Posio (2017) compares the corpus analyzed in the present paper, collected in Porto, Portugal (see Section 2), with a comparable sociolinguistic interview corpus from Salamanca, Spain, finding that the frequency of the impersonal second-person singular is almost five times higher in the Spanish data (9.69 occurrences per 10,000 words in the Salamanca corpus, as opposed to 1.84 occurrences in the Porto corpus). In addition, while all informants in both the Porto and the Salamanca corpus use the second-person singular as an address form in reference to the interviewer, in the Porto corpus only half of them use it impersonally, while in the Salamanca corpus all informants use the impersonal second-person singular to some extent.…”

“…Unfortunately, there are no larger-scale comparable speech corpora available from Portuguese and Spanish representing communicative situations where the second-person singular is used for addressing the interlocutor that would permit evaluating this observation in the light of more data. However, since the second-person singular constitutes a direct reference to the addressee, it could be the case that its use for impersonalization is avoided due to it being a potentially face-threatening act, in particular if there are significant differences in the age or social status of the speakers (Carreira 2005;Posio 2017).…”

“…The distribution of uno and the impersonal second person singular in different varieties of Spanish seems to reflect similar pragmatic and cultural preferences that could explain the existence of the pessoa constructions in EP. In some varieties of Spanish, like the Andean variety, the impersonal pronoun uno 'one' is preferred over the second person singular (Guirado 2011), whereas in other varieties like Peninsular Spanish uno is gradually becoming obsolete and is being replaced by the second person singular (Cameron 1993;Blanco Canales 2004: 282;Guirado 2011;Posio 2017). The complementary distribution of uno and the second person singular has been correlated with the choice of address forms: those dialects where the second person singular is less common a choice for addressing the interlocutor also show a less frequent use of the second-person singular as an impersonalization strategy (Guirado 2011).…”

“…However, the NP (noun phrase) a pessoa 'the person' and uma pessoa 'a person' have been mentioned sporadically in the literature as alternatives to other impersonal and personal referential devices (Dias 1918: 89;Nunes 1919: 265) or as indefinite pronouns (Stolz 1991: 12). More recently, Duarte & Marques (2014), Posio (2017) and Martins (2019) have discussed the use of pessoa also for first-person singular as well as impersonal reference in EP, and Amaral and Mihatsch (2019) for impersonal reference in BP.…”

“…Although the constructions with the noun pessoa present some signs of grammaticalization like semantic bleaching, accompanied by a high usage frequency in comparison with the cognate lexeme persona in Spanish (Amaral & Mihatsch 2019;Posio 2017), there is no evidence of an ongoing change eventually leading to a "full" category shift from noun phrase to pronoun. The grammatical status of these constructions can be compared to that of a gente, literally 'the people', used for impersonal or first-person plural reference.…”