Although deictic personal pronouns (e.g. I, you) seem to express same cross-linguistic meanings, speakers’ use of such pronouns and other reference strategies in same communicative tasks presents considerable sociolinguistic and cross-linguistic variation. The present paper examines the ways speakers refer to themselves in Peninsular Spanish (PS) and European Portuguese (EP). The data consist of comparable sociolinguistic interviews totaling ca. 160,000 words and 30 informants from Salamanca (Fernández 2005) and Porto (Author, in progress).
Although the informants use first-person singular forms by default, they also habitually employ other referring expressions such as second-person-singulars and first-person-plurals, the PS indefinite pronoun uno ‘one’ and the EP noun pessoa ‘person’ when referring to themselves. The choice of referring expression creates different types of intersubjectivities in the discourse (Nuyts 2006). A comparison of PS and EP data shows that language, speakers’ age, gender, and relationship with the interviewer all correlate with their choice of referential devices. The main empirical findings are that (1) women use more intersubjective forms in PS but not in EP and (2) elderly speakers of PS and all EP speakers use more collective but less addressee-involving forms such as second-person singulars (Author 2016, in press). Both sociolinguistic and socio-cultural factors such as different politeness and face preferences in the speaker communities (Carreira 2005, Hickey 2005) account for the differences.
Author. 2016. You and we: Impersonal second person singular and other referential devices in Spanish sociolinguistic interviews. Journal of Pragmatics 99, 1-16.
Author, in press. Entre lo impersonal y lo individual. Estrategias de impersonalización individualizadoras en el español y portugués europeos. Spanish in Context.
Carreira, M.H.A. 2005. “Politeness in Portugal: How to Address Others?” In Hickey, L. & Stewart, M. (eds.), Politeness in Europe, p. 306-316. Clevedon/Buffalo/Toronto: Multilingual matters.
Fernández Juncal, C. 2005. Corpus de habla culta de Salamanca. Burgos, Instituto Castellano y Leonés de la Lengua.
Hickey, L. 2005. “Politeness in Spain: Thanks but No ‘Thanks’. In Hickey, L. & Stewart, M. (eds.).
Nuyts, J. 2006. Modality: Overview and linguistic issues. In: W. Frawley (ed.), The expression of modality, 1-26. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
