Towards a comprehensive view of variation in language: The absolute variable

Oliva, Miguel Ángel Aijón; Serrano, María José

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2011.07.001

Cited by 22 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In other words, it is not our purpose to investigate the use of omitted first-person plurals as against expressed ones – in fact, the often exiguous percentages of the latter would make such an inquiry scarcely productive. Rather, we intend to go deeper into the use of first-person plurals as meaningful discursive choices in themselves (Aijón Oliva and Serrano, 2012: 86–87).…”

Section: Corpora and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Serrano

Oliva

2013

Discourse & Communication

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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.

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Section: Corpora and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Serrano

Oliva

2013

Discourse & Communication

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“…Linguistic choices construct meanings in context, and in doing so they formalize different perceptions of the self, of others and of reality altogether. This all makes it possible for such choices to be used as stylistic tools, understanding ‗style' as the construction of personal and social identities in communicative contexts (Coupland, 2007;Auer ed., 2007;Eckert, 2008;Aijón-Oliva & Serrano, 2012).…”

Section: The Sociostylistic Side Of the Passivementioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical Choice and Meaning in Media Discourse: The Spanish Periphrastic Passive

Oliva

2013

Studies in Media and Communication

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This paper investigates the use of Spanish periphrastic passive constructions in a corpus of written-press and radio discourse from a Peninsular town. Their statistical patterning and their contextual effects are analyzed across a variety of textual genres and speaker socioprofessional groups within the domain of the media. The construction turns out to be more frequent as discourse approaches the prototype of written, informational communication, such as in press news items and radio news reports, as well as in the speech of journalists and broadcasters. A relationship is then hypothesized between such distribution and the inherent discursive meaning of the passive. Its basic motivation appears to be the enhancement of the salience of a semantic patient by placing it in the position of the clause subject, which is parallel to a notional blurring of the agent. This largely explains the usual occurrence of passive constructions across informational discourse dealing with external third-person referents, as well as their association with the speech of the socioprofessional groups that most often produce such kind of discourse. It is concluded that the patterns of variation found among social groups and situations are undetachable from the discursive meanings generated by linguistic choices.

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Moving towards the realm of the other: second-person objectivization in Spanish media discourse

Oliva

Serrano

2014

Language Sciences

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Towards a comprehensive view of variation in language: The absolute variable

Cited by 22 publications

References 31 publications

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

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

Grammatical Choice and Meaning in Media Discourse: The Spanish Periphrastic Passive

Moving towards the realm of the other: second-person objectivization in Spanish media discourse

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