Speaker self-profiling through discursive indexation and syntactic encoding in Spanish radio talk

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Syntactic and discursive choices in context constitute resources for the interactional profiling of the direct participants. This study analyzes the frequencies with which speakers index themselves, as well as the syntactic functions they tend to accord themselves when doing so, in a corpus of Peninsular Spanish radio discourse featuring a variety of textual genres and speaker socioprofessional identities. The analysis is restricted to indexations of the singular first person in central syntactic functions, i.e. those with the capacity to establish agreement with the verb. A dichotomy is proposed between subject and (accusative or dative) object self-encoding, based on the different morphological means through which verbal agreement is carried out in this language, namely verbal endings and clitics. Both the statistical patterning of variation and the discursive-pragmatic motivations of particular choices are subsequently examined. The selection of a specific syntactic function for the encoding of the speaker is found to serve communicative goals related to the textual genre and to the kinds of socio-professional identities speakers intend to develop within it. Significant correlations are obtained between higher percentages of self-encoding as subject and of discursive self-indexation altogether, although speakers presenting themselves as political representatives diverge from this tendency for particular communicative reasons. The results are interpreted as being parallel to a discursive-cognitive continuum between subjectivity and objectivity that underlies speaker interactional self-profiling and discourse construction.Keywords: Syntactic variation; agreement; interactional profiling; subjectivity; objectivity; radio talk. RESUMEN: Las elecciones sintácticas y discursivas en contexto constituyen recursos para el desarrollo de los perfiles interaccionales de los participantes directos. El presente estudio analiza las frecuencias con las que los hablantes se indexan a sí mismos, así como las funciones sintácticas que se atribuyen preferentemente al hacerlo, en un corpus de español peninsular de los medios de comunicación, el cual refleja una variedad de géneros textuales e identidades socioprofesionales. El análisis se restringe a las indexaciones de la primera persona del singular en funciones sintácticas centrales, esto es, las que poseen la capacidad de establecer concordancia con el verbo. Se plantea una dicotomía entre autocodificación como sujeto y como objeto (acusativo o dativo), teniendo en cuenta los diferentes recursos morfológicos con que se realiza la concordancia verbal en esta lengua: desinencias verbales y clíticos. Seguidamente se examinan los patrones estadísticos de la variación, así como las motivaciones discursivo-pragmáticas de ejemplos específicos. Se comprueba que la selección de una determinada función sintáctica para codificar al hablante obedece a objetivos comunicativos relacionados con el * This paper is part of the research project "Variación gramatical y creación del si...

Managing subjectivity: Omission and expression of first-person singular object a mí in Spanish media discourse

“…Previous research studies on subject and object variation found similar results regarding the omission of pronominal subject (Aijón Oliva and Serrano 2013) and person object (Aijón Oliva 2017a, 2017b; Serrano 2017a, 2017b) variants 2…”

“…Spanish has an objective conjugation system (Llorente and Mondéjar 1974, Aijón Oliva 2006: 173–174). Clitics should not be considered to be personal pronouns but should instead be seen as agreement morphemes due to their atonicity, strict adjacency to verbs, and ability to co-occur with coreferential tonic pronouns and noun phrases in the same clause (Aijón Oliva 2017b). The ability to achieve pronominal indexation by clitics is a formal property of objects in Spanish (García-Miguel 2015: 207).…”