Cover not available
Article published In:
Hearer-Orientation in Spoken Genres
Edited by Bert Cornillie and Barbara De Cock
[Spanish in Context 12:1] 2015
► pp. 10–34

Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and non-subjectivity across spoken language genres

Various authors have pointed out a relationship between (inter)subjectivity and spoken language. This article looks into the relationship between subjectivity, intersubjectivity, non-subjectivity and spoken discourse genres in a more detailed way. On the basis of a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates, this article offers a detailed operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and non-subjectivity, and shows that they may be expressed not only in person deixis (which is typically associated with these phenomena) but also in impersonal strategies. On the other hand, the analysis of three spoken discourse genres shows that these concepts contribute to establishing a more detailed genre typology. Moreover, they allow for describing more accurately the usage pattern of specific deictic and impersonal strategies.

Keywords: subjectivity, spoken discourse, genre
Published online: 23 June 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.12.1.02coc
References (67)
Athanasiadou, Angeliki, Costas P. Canakis, and Bert Cornillie
(eds) 2006 Subjectification: Various Paths to Subjectivity. Cognitive linguistics research 31. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baumgarten, Nicole, Inke Du Bois, and Juliane House
2012 “Introduction”. In Subjectivity in Language and in Discourse, ed. by Nicole Baumgarten, Inke Du Bois, and Juliane House. Bingley: Emerald. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benveniste, Emile
1966 Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Editions Gallimard.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas
1988 Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blas Arroyo, José Luis
2000 “Mire usted Sr. González... Personal Deixis in Spanish Political-Electoral Debate.” Journal of Pragmatics 321: 1–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 “En los límites de la (des)cortesía: formas atenuadas de la agresividad verbal en el debate político español.” I.T.L. Review of Applied Linguistics 137–1381: 181–204.Google Scholar
2003 “ ‘Perdóneme que se lo diga, pero vuelve usted a faltar a la verdad, Señor González’: form and function of politic verbal behaviour in face-to-face Spanish political debates.” Discourse & Society 14 (4): 395–423. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Políticos en conflicto: una aproximación pragmático-discursiva al debate electoral cara a cara. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Briz, Antonio
1998 El español coloquial en la conversación: esbozo de pragmagramática. Lingüística. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar
Butt, John, and Carmen Benjamin
1988 A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Cornillie, Bert
2007 Epistemic Modality and Evidentiality in Spanish (semi-)auxiliaries. A Cognitive-functional Approach. Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen
2000 “Egophoricity in discourse and syntax”. Functions of Language 7 (1): 37–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cock, Barbara
2005 “Spain, Portugal and Europe in Spanish International Relations Discourse: A Linguistic Approach to Group and Identity Construction”. In España en la Europa del siglo XX. Cuadernos de Yuste 3, ed. by Michel Dumoulin, and Antonio Ventura Díaz Díaz, 279–300. Yuste: Fundación Academia Europea de Yuste.Google Scholar
2006 “El discurso político entre oral y escrito”. In Usos Sociales del Lenguaje y Aspectos Psicolingüísticos. Perspectivas Aplicadas, ed. by Joana Salazar, Marian Amengual, and María Juan, 123–130. Palma: Universitat de les Illes Balears, Servei de Publicaciones i Intercanvi Científic.Google Scholar
2009 “Funciones pragmáticas de la referencia de persona en el lenguaje coloquial y en el discurso político”. Oralia 121: 247–266.Google Scholar
2010a “La funcionalidad discursiva del esquema construccional: Los españoles hemos hecho historia en Europa ”. Lingüística española actual XXXII/21, 173–95.Google Scholar
2010b A Discourse-functional Analysis of Speech Participant Profiling in Spoken Spanish. PhD thesis. KULeuven.
2011 “Why We can be You: The Use of 1st Person Plural forms with Hearer Reference in English and Spanish”. Journal of Pragmatics 431: 2762–2775. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014b “Verbos deónticos en primera persona: un corpus general frente a un corpus parlamentario”. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 591: 16–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
In press. “The Discursive Effects of Spanish Impersonals uno and se: A Case Study of the Phenomena of Speaker Inclusion and Female-Only Reference”. In Subjectivity and Epistemicity. Corpus, Discourse and Literary Approaches to Stance ed. by Dylan Glynn, and Mette Sjölin 107 120 Lund Lund University Press
Forthcoming.a. “Register and Referential Ambiguity of Personal Pronouns: A Cross-linguistic Analysis.”
Forthcoming.b. “Impersonals in Context: A Multivariate Analysis of Spanish uno and se .” In Modality and Intersubjectivity. Corpus Studies in Epistemic Structuring ed. by Dylan Glynn, and Karolina Krawczak Amsterdam John Benjamins
De Smet, Hendrik, and Jean-Christophe Verstraete
2006 “Coming to Terms with Subjectivity”. Cognitive Linguistics 17 (3): 365–392.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W
2007 “The Stance Triangle”. In Stancetaking in Discourse, ed. by Robert Englebretson, 139–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, Anita
2008a “Cognitive Verbs in Discourse: Subjectivity Meets Intersubjectivity.” In English Now. Papers from the 20 th IAUPE Conference , ed. by Marianne Thormählen, 292–307. Lund: Lund University.
2008b ““And I Think that is a Very Straightforward Way of Dealing with it”: The Communicative Functions of Cognitive Verbs in Political Discourse”. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27 (4): 384–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garcia, Erica C
2009 The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs: Cognitive Constraints on Spanish Cliticclustering. [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 61.] Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gelabert, Jaime
2004 Pronominal and Spatio-temporal Deixis in Contemporary Spanish Political Discourse: A Corpus-based Pragmatic Analysis. PhD Thesis. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University.Google Scholar
Gelabert-Desnoyer, Jaime
2006 “Registro y funciones de “nosotros” en el discurso parlamentario español”. Lingüística en la Red 41: 1–21.Google Scholar
2008 “Not so Impersonal: Intentionality in the Use of Pronoun uno in Contemporary Spanish Political Discourse”. Pragmatics 18 (3): 407–424. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy
1993 English Grammar: A Function-Based Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grau i Tarruell, Maria
2000 “A propòsit de la subjectivitat”. Llengua i ús: revista tècnica de política lingüística 191: 41–49. Accessed on July 29th, 2014. [URL]Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A.K., and Ruqaiya Hasan
1989 Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hanegreefs, Hilde
2008 Los verbos de percepción visual. Un análisis de corpus en un marco cognitivo. PhD thesis KULeuven.
Heritage, John
2005 “Cognition in Discourse”. In Conversation and Cognition, ed. by Hedwig te Molder, and Jonathan Potter, 184–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 “Intersubjectivity and Progressivity”. In Person Reference in Interaction. Linguistic, Cultural and social Perspectives, ed. by Nick J. Enfield, and Tanya Stivers, 255–280. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hidalgo Navarro, Antonio
1996-1997 “Sobre los mecanismos de impersonalización en conversación coloquial: el tú impersonal”. ELUA (Estudios de Lingüística Universidad de Alicante) 111: 163–176.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail
1987 “On Exposed and Embedded Correction in Conversation”. In Talk and social organization, ed. by Graham Button, and John R.E. Lee, 86–100. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Kärde, Sven
1943 Quelques manières d’exprimer l’idee d’un sujet indéterminé ou général en espagnol. Uppsala: AppelbergsBoktryckeriaktiebolag.Google Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine
2005 Le Discours en Interaction. Paris: Armand Colin.Google Scholar
Kluge, Bettina
2010 “El uso de formas de tratamiento en las estrategias de generalización”. In Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico, ed. by Martin Hummel, Bettina Kluge, and María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop, 1107–1136. México - Graz: El colegio de México - Karl-Franzens-Universität.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W
1987 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lyons, John
1982 “Deixis and Subjectivity: Loquor, ergo sum?” In Speech, Place and Action: Studies in Deixis and Related Topics, ed. by Robert J. Jarvella, and Wolfgang Klein, 101–124. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
1994 “Subjecthood and Subjectivity”. In Subjecthood and Subjectivity. The Status of the Subject in Linguistic Theory, ed. by Marina Yaguello, 9–17. Paris: Ophrys.Google Scholar
Marín Jordà, Maria Josep
2005 Marcadors discursius procedents de verbs de percepció. Argumentació implícita en el debat electoral. Quaderns de filologia. Anejo 59. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia.Google Scholar
Martin Zorraquino, María Antonia, and José PortoIés Lázaro
1999 “Los marcadores del discurso.” In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, ed. by Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, 31: 4051–213. Madrid: EspasaCalpe.Google Scholar
Nogué Serrano, Neus
2008a La dixi de persona en català. Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat.Google Scholar
2008b “La dixi de persona en el discurs acadèmic oral en català”. Caplletra 441: 195–218.Google Scholar
Nogué Serrano, Neus, and Barbara De Cock
Ms. “The Pragmatics of Person Reference. A Comparative Study of Spanish and Catalan”.
Nuyts, Jan
2001 “Subjectivity as an Evidential Dimension in Epistemic Modal Expressions”. Journal of Pragmatics 331: 383–400. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Palmer, F.R
1965 A Linguistic Study of the English Verb. London: Longmans.Google Scholar
Posio, Pekka
2011 “Spanish Subject Pronoun Usage and Verb Semantics Revisited: First and Second Person Singular Subject Pronouns and Focusing of Attention in Spoken Spanish”. Journal of Pragmatics 431: 777–798. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A
1992 “Repair after Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation”. American Journal of Sociology 97 (5): 1295–1345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scheibman, Joanne
2001 “Local Patterns of Subjectivity in Person and Verb Type in American English Conversation”. In Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, ed. by Joan Bybee, and Paul Hopper, 61–89. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 “Inclusive and Exclusive Patterning of the English First Person Plural: Evidence from Conversation”. In Language, Culture and Mind, ed. by Michel Achard, and Suzanne Kemmer, 377–96. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
2007 “Subjective and Intersubjective Uses of Generalizations in English Conversations”. In Stancetaking in Discourse, ed. by Robert Englebretson, 111–137. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schroten, Jan
1972 Concerning the Deep Structures of Spanish Reflexive Sentences. [Janua Linguarum, Series Practica 173.] The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Searle, John Rogers
1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Serrano, María José
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
Traugott, Elisabeth C
2003 “From Subjectification to Intersubjectification”. In Motives for Language Change, ed. by Raymond Hickey, 124–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C., and Richard B. Dasher
2002 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vázquez Rozas, Victoria
2006 “ Gustar-type Verbs”. In Functional Approaches to Spanish Syntax. Lexical Semantics, Discourse and Transitivity, ed. by J. Clancy Clements and Jiyoung Yoon, 80–114. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vázquez Rozas, Victoria, and José María García-Miguel
2006 “Transitividad, subjetividad y frecuencia de uso”. VII Congrés de Lingüística General . Barcelona, 18 al 21 de abril de 2006. [Actas en CD-ROM. ISBN: 84-475-2086-8].
Verhagen, Arie
2005 Constructions of Intersubjectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Verstraete, Jean-Christophe
2005 “Scalar Quantity Implicatures and the Interpretation of Modality: Problems in the Deontic Domain”. Journal of Pragmatics 371: 1401–1418. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (10)

Cited by 10 other publications

Bodrunova, Svetlana S.
2024. Opinion Types on Social Media: A Review of Approaches to What Opinions Are in Social vs. Computational Science. In Social Computing and Social Media [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 14705], ► pp. 81 ff. DOI logo
Ahn, Mikyung & Foong Ha Yap
2023. When a third person pronoun means ‘you’: An analysis of Korean tangsin and speaker stance. Journal of Pragmatics 210 ► pp. 157 ff. DOI logo
Amon, Marri
2023. Between rhetorical questions and information requests: A versatile interrogative clause in Estonian. Open Linguistics 9:1 DOI logo
Gancedo Ruiz, Marta & M.ª Amparo Soler Bonafont
2023. Patrones relacionales de la expresión de la epistemicidad y la gestión de la imagen en el español peninsular. Spanish in Context 20:3 ► pp. 550 ff. DOI logo
De Cock, Barbara
2022. Register, genre and referential ambiguity of personal pronouns. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 361 ff. DOI logo
De Cock, Barbara & Bettina Kluge
2022. On the referential ambiguity of personal pronouns and its pragmatic consequences. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 351 ff. DOI logo
Aijón Oliva, Miguel A.
2020. It can be us or you. The desubjectification of viewpoint through person choice in Spanish oral and written media discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 163 ► pp. 4 ff. DOI logo
Vázquez Laslop, María Eugenia
2019. Pragmatic and grammatical categories for the analysis of forms of address in presidential election debates. In It’s not all aboutyou [Topics in Address Research, 1], ► pp. 306 ff. DOI logo
De Cock, Barbara, Aurélie Marsily, Andrea Pizarro Pedraza & Marie Rasson
2018. ¿Quién atenúa y cuándo en español?. Spanish in Context 15:2 ► pp. 305 ff. DOI logo
Posio, Pekka
2016. You and we: Impersonal second person singular and other referential devices in Spanish sociolinguistic interviews. Journal of Pragmatics 99 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 july 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.