“I don’t know” in Spanish couples therapy: Pragmatic uses and entitlements to knowledge

Dorota Kotwica
Universitat de València

This paper focuses on the use of first-person negative constructions with the verb saber (‘to know’) in a sample of Spanish-language couples therapy. The analysis considers the form of these constructions, along with their position, scope, the contextual features related to the topics discussed, the speakers’ roles, and the exclusive/shared entitlements of the speakers to knowledge. The results highlight the relevance of examining the use of both cognitive and non-cognitive uses of no sé (NS). Cognitive NSs are used referentially as knowledge disclaimers, but also carry rhetorical functions related to the speaker’s reluctance to talk about topics to which she/he is not entirely entitled. In addition, non-cognitive NSs can be used by speakers as polyfunctional discourse markers (DM), especially for textual, mitigating and interactional purposes, which, to an extent, can also be interpreted in the light of who is entitled to know (and talk about) a given subject.

Publication history

Date received: 26 August 2025

Date accepted: 15 April 2026

Table of contents

The literal use of the verb to know “communicates a speaker’s state of access to some piece of knowledge, or in the negated form, lack of such access” (Lindström, Maschler and Pekarek Doehler 2016, 72). In the case of the negative 1st-person forms used in interaction, structures equivalent to I don’t know (IDK) across many languages, apart from indicating a speaker’s lack of knowledge about something, accomplish a variety of pragmatic and discursive functions, especially those related to interactional, organizational, and stance-oriented goals (Tsui 1991; Hutchby 2002; Watherall 2011; Pekarek Doehler 2016; Keevallik 2016; Lindström and Karlsson 2016; Helmer, Reineke and Depperman 2016, among others). These functions emerge when the original meaning of the verb undergoes a process of bleaching so that “the construction may then communicate other kinds of meaning, and its lexical semantics may be reduced to such an extent that the construction operates in a manner akin to a discourse marker” (Lindström, Maschler and Pekarek Doehler 2016, 73).

Funding

This research has been made possible thanks to the support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for the projects ESPRINT, “Estrategias pragmático-retóricas en la interacción conversacional conflictiva entre íntimos y conocidos: intensificación, atenuación y gestión interaccional” (ref. PID2020-114805GB-I00) and ESPRINTER, “Estudio de las estructuras pragmático-interactivas de la comunicación conflictiva entre parejas en español: conversaciones y terapias de pareja en América y España” (ref. PID2024-156013NB-I00).

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Universitat de València.

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Address for correspondence

Dorota Kotwica

Spain

[email protected]

Biographical notes

Dorota Kotwica is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish Philology at the University of Valencia and a member of the Val.Es.Co. research group. She specializes in the pragmatic-discursive study of evidentiality, epistemicity, and mitigation. Her research explores these phenomena across diverse datasets, including conversational and digital corpora, as well as the historical evolution of scientific discourse.

ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0728-4600
 
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