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Spanish subject pronoun usage and verb semantics revisited: First and second person singular subject pronouns and focusing of attention in spoken Peninsular Spanish
Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 777–798
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Spanish subject pronoun usage and verb semantics revisited: First and second person singular subject pronouns and focusing of attention in spoken Peninsular Spanish Pekka Posio * Department of Modern Languages, Unioninkatu 40 A, P.O. Box 24, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 7 December 2009 Received in revised form 6 October 2010 Accepted 11 October 2010
A considerable body of literature exists on the use of subject pronouns in Spanish. However, the influence of semantic and pragmatic factors on subject pronoun usage has not been examined thoroughly enough. This paper deals with the frequency and patterns of usage of first and second person singular subject pronouns with [1_TD$IF]14 different verbs in a corpus of spoken Peninsular Spanish. It is argued that the differences attested in subject pronoun usage between the verbs can be explained by the focusing of attention on the clausal participants of the verbs involved (i.e., connected to the semantic role of the subject and the level of transitivity of the clause) and by the discourse functions of the verb forms in question. In addition, some frequently used first person singular verb forms can be analyzed as formulaic sequences which are used to express the speaker’s subjective or epistemic stance. ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Spanish Subject pronoun Semantic role Transitivity Focus First person singular Lexical semantics
1. Introduction The usage and omission of subject pronouns in Spanish has attracted lots of attention and has led to the formation of various theories and explanations related to such factors as disambiguation, switch reference, turn-taking and topicalization (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Hochberg, 1986; Bentivoglio, 1987; Morales, 1989, 1997; Cameron, 1992, 1993; Ranson, 1991; Davidson, 1996; Miyajima, 2000; Ferna´ndez Soriano, 1999; Silva-Corvala´n, 1997, 2001; Taboada, 2002; Stewart, 2003; Hurtado, 2005; Travis, 2007). However, less effort has been put into explaining why the frequency of subject pronouns varies between different verbs, tenses, and moods. This paper aims at providing a functional, clause-level explanation of the differences attested in the use of subject pronouns with different verbs and verb types in spoken Peninsular Spanish. I examine equalsized samples of 14 verbs used in first and second person singular in the present of indicative using data from the Corpus de Referencia del Espan˜ol Actual (CREA). The study is focused on the first person singular, but examples from the second person singular will also be analyzed and contrasted to the first person. I start from the hypothesis that subject pronoun usage reflects a higher level of prominence given to the subject, whereas subject pronouns are used less often when another element is given more attention in the clause. Focusing of attention accounts for several phenomena connected to the use of subject pronouns, such as the differences attested in subject pronoun frequency between different verbs or semantic roles (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Bentivoglio, 1987; Morales, 1997;
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 919128311. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.012
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Miyajima, 2000; Hurtado, 2005; Posio, 2008, in press) and tenses and moods (cf. Silva-Corvala´n, 1997, 2001). Such an explanation accounts also for the contrastive and emphatic contexts where subject pronoun usage is considered obligatory and the use of subject pronouns to increase the ‘‘pragmatic weight’’ of an utterance (Davidson, 1996). The organization of this paper is as follows: in section 2, obligatory and optional usage of subject pronouns is defined and the previous studies are discussed, paying special attention to the studies on semantic factors. In section 3 I present my hypothesis and data. Section 4 contains the results of the quantitative analysis and discussion of the results in the light of qualitative examination of examples. The main findings are summarized briefly in section 5. 2. Variation between null and overt pronominal subjects 2.1. Obligatory and optional usage of subject pronouns The use of independent subject pronouns in Spanish is considered optional in most contexts. Although there is no general agreement regarding the limits of this optionality, there are some clear cases where subject pronouns must be either used or omitted. Subject pronouns cannot be omitted when they serve as antecedents for relative clauses or when they contain focal information[2_TD$IF],1[3_TD$IF] as in the constructed example (1)2: ?
(1)
Quie´n lo
who
hizo?
Lo
yo. *Lo
hice
3SG.ACC do.3SG.PRET.IND 3SG.ACC do.1SG.PRET I
hice.
*3SG.ACC do.1SG.PRET
‘Who did it?’ – ‘I did it.’ The use of subject pronouns is also obligatory in contexts where a contrast is established between two referents[4_TD$IF],3[5_TD$IF] as in the constructed example (2): (2)
Yo hablo I
y
tu´
escuchas.
speak.1SG.PRES.IND and you listen.2SG.PRES.IND
‘I speak and you listen.’ Normative grammar explains subject pronoun usage as a way of emphasizing or contrasting the referent of the subject (cf. Butt and Benjamin, 2004:130), although it is not always clear what is meant by these concepts outside of the obligatory contexts that are rare in normal conversational data. Just to give an example, the 2[6_TD$IF]800 clauses analyzed for the present study contained about 30 clauses where the use of subject pronouns was estimated to be obligatory according to the criteria established above. These sentences were consequently excluded from the analysis. Bentivoglio (1987:48), who studied subject pronoun usage in Venezuelan Spanish found only 36 clearly emphatic subjects4 in her sample of 892 clauses (i.e. 4% of the data), only 20 of which occurred with a subject pronoun (i.e. 2% of the data). The use of constructed examples like (1[8_TD$IF] )–(2) thus sheds little light on actual language usage[9_TD$IF]. ˜ ola (Ferna´ndez Soriano, 1999:1227) gives the example reproduced The descriptive grammar of the Real Academia Espan here as (3) to illustrate a use of subject pronouns described as ‘‘totally impossible’’ given the fact that Spanish is a null subject language: (3)
*Yo me
vestı´
y
despue´s yo fui
I 1SG.REFL dress.1SG.PRET.IND and after
I
go.1SG.PRET.IND
a
recoger
a
mi hijo,
PRE
pick.up.INF
PRE
my son
‘I dressed up and then I went to pick up my son pero yo llegue´ but I
tarde.
arrive.1SG.PRET.IND late
but I arrived late.’ (Ferna´ndez Soriano, 1999:1227)
1 Note that in such contexts the subject pronoun is usually postverbal and clause-final. In spoken Peninsular Spanish, the frequency of postverbal subject pronouns is circa 12% in first person singular (Posio, 2008:37), while the frequency of postverbal NP subjects seems to vary between 18% and 40%, depending on the study (cf. Meyer-Hermann, 1990). The position of subject pronouns relative to the verb will not be focused on in this study. 2 The glossing used in the examples follows the Leipzig Glossing Rules but it is somewhat simplified in regard to aspects that are not relevant for the point illustrated, such as number and gender agreement of determiners and adjectives. Boldface is used to highlight all 1st and 2nd person singular verb forms and pronouns appearing in the examples. 3 Matos Amaral and Schwenter (2005) argue that even in these kinds of contexts the subject pronouns are not obligatory if the utterance contains some other expression referring directly or indirectly to the referent of the subject, such as aquı´ ‘here’, honestamente ‘honestly’, por mi parte ‘for my part’, etc. 4 In Bentivoglio’s (1987) study, only clauses that contained an overt marker of emphasis, such as the word pero ‘but’, mismo ‘self’ (e[23_TD$IF].g. yo mismo ‘myself’), justamente ‘precisely’, etc. were considered emphatic.
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However, it is questionable whether the alleged impossibility of example (3) is due to the presence of subject pronouns per se. It is relatively easy to find similar examples with abundant subject pronoun usage in naturally occurring data. Example (4) is the beginning of a phone call to a television call-in program. The speaker uses the subject pronoun yo with three consecutive verbs, just as in the constructed example (3): (4)
Bueno, pues yo quiero PART
PART
I
decir
que
want.1SG.PRES.IND say.INF
COMPL
‘Well, I want to say that yo estoy I
en contra de la Homeopatı´a, porque
be.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE
against
PRE DET
homeopathy because
I am against homeopathy, because yo hice I
tambie´n un tratamiento de adelgazamiento [. . .]
do.1SG.PRET also
a
treatment
PRE
weight.loss
I have also done a weight loss treatment. . .’ Pasa la vida, 15/02/96, TVE 1 The fact that example (4) is not ‘‘totally impossible’’ suggests that it is not the presence or absence of subject pronouns itself that affects the acceptability of an utterance, but rather the semantic and pragmatic context where the subject pronoun occurs. Example (3) is a narration of past events in the preterite tense that is known to disfavour subject pronoun usage (cf. Silva-Corvala´n, 1997:126 and section 3.1). In example (4), the first two subject pronouns are used with verbs that express the speaker’s subjective stance and the third one with a verb that begins a narration of her personal experience. Although these factors may favour subject pronoun usage, they hardly make it ‘‘obligatory’’. In order to find a satisfactory explanation to subject pronoun presence or absence in real data, one has to look at the semantics and pragmatics of subject pronoun usage and avoid categorical acceptability judgments. 2.2. Explaining optional subject pronoun usage: previous studies A traditional functional explanation argues that subject pronouns serve to disambiguate subject person in those moods and tenses where the first and third person singular have syncretic forms (the imperfect of indicative, the conditional and the subjunctive) or in dialects where the loss of postnuclear /s/ expands the syncretism to the second person singular as well (cf. Hochberg, 1986). However, the relevance of ambiguity avoidance has been questioned in later research (e.g. Ranson, 1991; Cameron, 1992, 1993, 1996). It is unlikely to motivate subject pronoun usage in spoken language, where the referent of the subject is usually made clear by the context (cf. Hurtado, 2005). Cameron (1992, 1993) has shown that ambiguity avoidance interacts with switch reference: simply put, subject pronouns are more frequently used instead of null subjects when the subject is not coreferential with the previous one. Although this is an important explanatory factor, it is not able to account for the differences found in subject pronoun usage between different verbs or semantic roles (cf. section 2.2.1). Subject pronoun usage has also been argued to be sensitive to a priming effect, according to which the use of subject pronouns would attract more subject pronouns and the use of null subjects would attract more null subjects (Travis, 2007). Sociolinguistic factors such as the age, sex, or scholarity of the speakers seem to be fairly irrelevant to tendencies in subject pronoun usage (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Bentivoglio, 1987:57–58; Cameron, 1992; Silva-Corvala´n, 1997:122). Dialectal differences, however, are important, and several studies have shown that the use of subject pronouns is considerably more frequent in Caribbean Spanish than in other varieties (e.g. Morales, 1989; Cameron, 1993). In theories dealing with anaphora and the choice of referring expressions, the use of subject pronouns is considered to indicate a lower level of accessibility or givenness (Taboada, 2005) of the referent than the use of null anaphora (Ariel, 1994:30, 2001:31), which in turn requires that the referent is ‘‘at the current center of attention’’ (Gundel et al., 1993:279). However, the effects of accessibility or givenness have been studied mostly for the anaphoric third person and it is unclear to what extent they apply to first and second person referents that are present in the communicative situation and thus need not be activated in the short-term memory of the speakers. First and second person singular pronouns typically refer to the speaker and the addressee, although they may also be used for generic reference (cf. section 4.9 and Ferna´ndez Soriano and Ta´boas Baylı´n, 1999:1723). They thus differ fundamentally from anaphoric third person pronouns that have a considerably larger range of potential referents that need to be introduced into the discourse. 2.2.1. Previous studies on semantic factors affecting subject pronoun usage The fact that different verbs are associated with different frequencies of subject pronoun usage has been demonstrated in various studies on several Spanish dialects (e.g. Enrı´quez, 1984; Bentivoglio, 1987; Morales, 1997; Miyajima, 2000; Hurtado, 2005; Posio, 2008, in press). However, the findings are not directly commensurate, as the criteria for selecting and classifying the data vary from one study to another. In addition, subject pronoun frequency depends on grammatical person, being
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Table 1 Frequency of subject pronoun expression with different verbs in Enrı´quez (1984). 1. Verbs that express an opinion or judgement of the speaker (like creer ‘believe, think’, considerar ‘consider’, imaginar ‘imagine’): subject pronoun frequency of 54.45% 2. Verbs that express mental activity (like saber ‘know’, querer ‘want’, aprender ‘learn’, imaginar ‘imagine’): subject pronoun frequency of 28.17% 3. Stative verbs that do not express a dynamic process exercised by the subject (like ser ‘be’, estar ‘be’,a tener ‘have’, saber ‘know’, vivir ‘live’): subject pronoun frequency of 22.94% 4. Verbs that express external activity (like hacer ‘do’, traer ‘bring’, decir ‘say’, hablar ‘speak’, ver ‘see’, oı´r ‘hear’, ir ‘go’, venir ‘come’): subject pronoun frequency of 20.00% (Enrı´quez, 1984:244–245) a
The semantic difference between the verbs ser and estar is discussed in section 4.2.
usually highest in the first person singular and lowest in plural persons (Enrı´quez, 1984), which has to be taken into account while comparing the results from different studies. Enrı´quez (1984), in her exhaustive study on subject pronoun frequency in educated speech in Madrid Spanish, found that the semantic properties of verbs affected the frequency of pronominal subjects. In her study, four groups of verbs were distinguished; the frequencies quoted in Table 1 include all grammatical persons. Enrı´quez (1984:244–245) concludes that subject pronoun usage is most frequent with verbs that express interior or subjective activity as opposed to verbs that express exterior or objective activity. Her explanation of this phenomenon is that speakers tend to emphasize the subjects of verbs that are used to express personal opinions. While this explanation accounts for the specific categories used in her study, the categories themselves are somewhat problematic. Firstly, the same verb can be included in two categories, depending on its meaning: the classification seems to be based on both the abstract lexeme of the verb and on the specific meaning of the verb in the context it appears in. Secondly, the categories are defined on the basis of very heterogeneous criteria. For instance, category 4, which contains verbs of ‘‘external activity’’, includes agentive verbs like hacer ‘do’, speech act verbs like decir ‘say’, sensory verbs like oı´r ‘hear’ and one-argument verbs and auxiliaries like ir ‘go’. It is also unclear to what extent the frequency of pronominal subject expression varies among verbs included in one category and what are the proportions of different verbs in one category: for example, one single frequently occurring verb lexeme (e.g. creer ‘think’) might account for a great deal of the higher frequency of subject pronoun presence in category 1. A simple way to avoid these problems would be to analyze equal-sized random samples of each verb lexeme, instead of counting all occurrences of all verbs in a given amount of data, and avoid the use of pre-established verbal categories (cf. section 3.2). However, scholars adopting a quantitative approach to Spanish subject pronoun usage have mostly employed a methodology similar to Enrı´quez (1984) although the definitions of verbal categories vary from one study to another. Bentivoglio (1987), in her study on Venezuelan Spanish, divided verbs into five categories based on Givo´n’s (1984) verb classification: (1) verbs of cognition, mental and modal verbs, (2) perceptive and sensory verbs, (3) verbs of diction, (4) volitional verbs, and (5) all the other verbs. According to Bentivoglio (1987:50–54), the first four groups had the highest rate of subject pronoun usage (53–60%) and the last group, consisting of ‘‘semantically neutral’’ verbs, a significantly lower rate (33%). Thus her conclusion was that only two classes of verbs exist in terms of subject pronoun frequency: (1) verbs of cognition, perception, diction and volition, and (2) all other verbs. Morales (1997) used a slightly different kind of classification in her study on subject pronoun frequency in Puerto Rican Spanish. Morales’s classification and the frequency of subject pronoun usage in the different classes is presented in Table 2. Because of the different classification criteria used, Enrı´quez (1984) includes for example the verb decir ‘say’ in the category of external activity, characterized by a low subject pronoun frequency, while Morales (1997) includes it in the mental and communicative category, characterized by a high subject pronoun frequency. Thus the only common statement that can be made on the basis of the two classifications is that the rather vague category of ‘‘mental verbs’’ seems to be associated with a higher subject pronoun frequency than the others. A similar result was obtained by Hurtado (2005) who used yet another kind of classification in her study on Colombian Spanish, distinguishing (1) cognitive verbs, (2) volitional verbs, (3) stative verbs, and (4) verbs that express external or objective activity. As in the previous studies, the cognitive verbs had the highest frequency of subject pronoun usage. Miyajima’s (2000) study focuses on the six most frequent verbs in her corpus of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Colombian Spanish. The frequencies of subject pronoun usage with these verbs are given in Table 3. Although the Pearson’s Chi-square test applied to Miyajima’s results shows that they are not statistically significant (x2 = 2.5, p = 0.78, N = 439), her interpretation of the results is interesting. She argues that the verbs associated with frequent subject pronoun usage are characterized by the presence of an ‘‘Invisible Agent’’, that is, they are verbs that express action that cannot be witnessed by others, and speakers feel the need to express the instigator of such invisible activities. What this
Table 2 Frequency of subject pronoun expression with different verbs in Morales (1997).
1. 2. 3. 4.
Verbs that express mental and communicative activity Intransitive verbs without adjective predicative Transitive verbs Intransitive verbs in general
1SG and 2SG
3SG and 3PL
47% 37% 33% 33%
41% 9% 25% 16%
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Table 3 Frequency of subject pronoun expression with different verbs in Miyajima (2000).
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
creer querer ver saber hacer poner
Frequency of subject pronouns
Verbs occurring with subject pronoun/total number of verbs in the category
40.9% 35.8% 30.8% 29.6% 25.8% 17.6%
28/53 18/42 11/28 33/91 14/41 20/60 (Miyajima, 2000:76)
Table 4 Frequency of subject pronoun expression with different semantic roles in Posio (2008).
Experiencer
Cognizer Volitioner Perceptor Emoter Agent S Total
Frequency of subject pronouns
Verbs occurring with subject pronoun/Total number of verbs in the category
40.9% 35.8% 30.8% 17.6% 29.6% 25.8% 32.2%
79/193 19/53 12/39 3/17 110/371 48/186 271/859
might suggest is that subject pronoun usage could be more frequent with Experiencer subjects in comparison to Agents, or perhaps with stative verbs as opposed to dynamic verbs. Posio (2008, in press) investigated the relation between the semantic role of the subject and subject pronoun frequency in the first person singular in oral corpora of Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese, using a classification based on the semantic role of the subject. The classification was thus intended to be purely semantic and not lexematic, and thus suitable for a contrastive study. Posio’s (2008) results concerning Peninsular Spanish data are presented in Table 4. The Pearson’s Chi-square test applied to Posio’s (2008) results shows that the differences found in subject pronoun frequency among the different semantic roles are statistically significant (x2 = 13.3, p = 0.02, N = 859). The set of semantic roles used is derived from the division of the subject category into two macro-roles, namely A, the subject of transitive clauses, and S, the subject of intransitive clauses, as defined by Dixon (1979). The macro-role S was left unanalyzed due to the reduced size of the corpus, but the macro-role A was divided further into two major subcategories, Agent and Experiencer, the latter of which was divided into Cognizer, Volitioner, Perceptor, and Emoter (cf. Van Valin, 2001:21–345). Thus Cognizer includes mainly the subjects of verbs that express cognitive events, such as creer ‘believe, think’, but also the subjects of other verbs used in a similar sense, such as ver ‘see’ (cf. section 4.6). The category of Volitioner includes for instance the subjects of the verbs querer ‘want’ and desear ‘desire’. The subject arguments of perceptive verbs such as ver ‘see’, oı´r ‘hear’, escuchar ‘listen’, and mirar ‘look’ were considered Perceptors. The subjects of agentive verbs were categorized as Agents. The subjects of verbs that express emotions or feelings, such as temer ‘fear’ and sentir ‘feel, be sorry’ were classified as Emoters. The high rating of Cognizer and Volitioner in Posio’s (2008) results is predictable on the basis of previous studies (e.g. Enrı´quez, 1984; Miyajima, 2000; Hurtado, 2005). However, Miyajima’s (2000) theory of ‘‘Invisible Agent’’ fails to explain the differences between the other semantic roles, as virtually all roles except Agent are candidates for the ‘‘Invisible Agent’’ category. Still there is considerable difference between Emoter and Cognizer, for instance, although they are both roles associated with mental and not physical events. Thus no clear link between the level of visibility or dynamicity of the action expressed by the verb and the frequency of subject pronoun usage can be shown. Enrı´quez’s (1984) explanation that subject pronouns are used with verbs that express the speakers’ commitment or opinion and thus require individuation of the subject person is in line with the high pronoun frequency in Cognizer, but the theory fails to account for the differences found between the other categories. In sum, while the results of all previous studies point at the existence of a tendency to use subject pronouns frequently with ‘‘cognitive verbs’’, it remains unclear what other general tendencies exist and what are their motivations. 2.2.2. Pragmatic motivation to subject pronoun usage Davidson (1996), who studies the pragmatic functions of first and second person singular subject pronouns in spoken Madrid Spanish, argues that in a sentence-initial position these pronouns function similarly as detached NP topics and that their main function in conversation is to add ‘‘pragmatic weight’’ to the utterance: It is my contention that speakers are using SPs [= subject pronouns] to add ‘pragmatic weight’ to their utterance, a theoretical label which subsumes the notions of ‘emphasis’ that other authors have proposed, but which explains more 5 Van Valin (2001) defines semantic roles as generalizations of verb-specific micro-roles. The granularity of the role categories depends on the analysis the roles are used for. In general, a semantic analysis requires more fine-grained distinctions than a syntactic analysis, for which only a few very general roles (e.g. ‘‘Agent’’ and ‘‘Patient’’) might suffice.
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Table 5 Frequency of subject pronoun expression in different tenses and moods in Silva-Corvala´n (1997). Verb form
Frequency
N
Preterite Present Imperfect, conditional and subjunctive
27% 33% 36%
105/387 236/718 172/479 (Silva-Corvala´n, 1997:126)
fully how speakers use the SPs to disambiguate possible epistemic parentheticals, trigger speech act readings of certain verbs, and increase their ‘stake’ in whatever they are saying, either in an argument or in a statement of belief; it also serves to explain such meta-linguistic uses of the SP as signalling an attempt to either take or, in the case of utterance-final second person SPs, hand over the floor. (Davidson, 1996:551) An argument in favour of using such a broad notion is that a subject pronoun may be used for various functions at the same time, and it is often difficult or unnecessary to make a sharp distinction between the functions (Davidson, 1996:552). Davidson’s observation that subject pronouns are used to trigger speech act readings of some verbs or disambiguate epistemic parentheticals has to do with such frequently occurring verbs as creer ‘think, believe’ or saber ‘know’. While for example the forms creo ‘I think’ and no se´ ‘I don’t know’ are frequently used in speech as epistemic parentheticals with no truth-functional meaning (i.e. they do not refer to thinking or knowing anything in concrete), the same verb forms used with a subject pronoun are argued to have a more concrete meaning (Davidson, 1996:559). I shall return to this hypothesis in sections 4.1 and 4.7. Stewart (2000, 2003) adds another facet to the discussion of the pragmatic functions of Spanish subject pronouns, namely that of politeness. According to Stewart (2000), the use of subject pronouns with verbs of cognition can be considered as a way of marking the speaker’s opinions as their own and not necessarily shared by the addressee or others: expressions such as yo creo ‘I think’ thus serve as ‘‘hedges’’ in the sense of Brown and Levinson (1987). 3. Hypothesis and selection of data 3.1. Theoretical background and research hypothesis As the review of previous research in section 2 shows, there is clearly a connection between verb semantics and subject pronoun usage, but it is less clear what that connection actually is. The present study aims at testing whether a general principle of focusing of attention is able to account not only for the differences found between different moods and tenses, as suggested by Silva-Corvala´n (1997, 2001), but also for the differences in subject pronoun usage between different verbs or semantic roles. Silva-Corvala´n (1997, 2001) mentions the focusing of attention as an alternative explanation to the fact that subject pronoun usage is more frequent in the imperfect of indicative, conditional and subjunctive than in the present and especially the preterite of indicative. While the more frequent subject pronoun has been attributed to ambiguity avoidance, Silva-Corvala´n (1997:127) suggests that it is more plausible that the use of subject pronouns is less frequent e.g. in the preterite than in the imperfect because the preterite refers to actions that are presented as foregrounded and dynamic, while the imperfect presents the past action as stative and backgrounded. The use of subject pronouns in the imperfect would thus be a way to distract the attention from the action expressed by the verb by drawing the attention towards the subject and, consequently, away from the action, while in the preterite the omission of subject pronouns would permit focusing more attention to the action. This idea is supported by data from Mexican-American Spanish in Table 5. The three verbal categories distinguished by Silva-Corvala´n (1997) on the basis of their discourse function differ also in terms of transitivity. ‘‘Transitivity’’ is understood here in the sense defined by Hopper and Thompson (1980) as a scalar variable dependent on many features such as number of participants, aspect, volitionality of the Agent, and affectedness of the Patient. The preterite is used to express perfective aspect, which presents past action as concluded, and clauses with a verb in the preterite are thus generally more transitive than clauses with a verb in the imperfect. The imperfect tense pertains to the domain of the imperfective aspect that presents the action as non-concluded and thus lower in transitivity. The subjunctive and the conditional do not express imperfective or perfective aspect per se, but they can be considered to be generally lower in transitivity than the indicative.6 The present of indicative is not overtly aspectual as opposed to the past tenses of indicative, and does not encode high or low transitivity, which is compatible with the fact that in Silva-Corvala´n’s (1997) results the frequency of subject pronouns in the present tense is very close to the average frequency of pronominal presence (32%) in her corpus. Following Silva-Corvala´n’s (1997, 2001) suggestion, I propose that the focusing of attention on the subject, on the action expressed by the verb or on non-subject participants could also be relevant in explaining the differences attested in subject pronoun usage within different semantic roles and verb lexemes. The subject is generally taken to be the most prominent participant of the clause – the ‘‘primary figure’’ in Cognitive Grammar’s terms (Langacker, 1991:323). However, the relative prominence of the participants depends on the level of transitivity of the clause: for example, in a highly transitive clause (e.g. I killed the cat.) the object is thoroughly affected and thus might gain more prominence than in a less transitive clause
6 The use of both subjunctive and conditional is nevertheless relatively infrequent in the first person singular in oral discourse (cf. Posio, 2008) and thus unlikely to affect the results if only the first person singular is considered.
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Table 6 Verbs chosen for the analysis and the number of occurrences in CREA-O. Form
Meaning
Occurrences in 1SG
Occurrences in 2SG
creer dar decir entender estar hacer ir pensar poner querer sentir ser venir ver Total
‘believe, think’ ‘give’ ‘say’ ‘understand’ ‘be’ ‘make, do’ ‘go’ ‘think’ ‘put’ ‘want’ ‘feel, be sorry’ ‘be’ ‘come’ ‘see’
6636 230 3390 291 2752 513 2821 933 267 1843 305 1795 167 828 22,771
396 231 722 334 1235 411 1138 185 166 709 56a 934 103 774 7394
a The corpus contained only 56 occurrences of the verb sentir ‘feel, be sorry’ in 2nd person singular, which were all included in the sample. Although the smaller size of the sample and the impossibility of creating a random sample make the results less commensurate with those obtained from the other verbs, it was essential to include this verb as an example of a verb taking an Emoter subject.
(e.g. I saw the cat.). Hence one would expect not only that subject pronouns are used when the subject is prominent, but also that they be absent when other elements gain more prominence in the clause. A less prominent coding of the subject could be a way of giving more prominence to other participants or the action expressed by the verb. It could thus be hypothesized that in events coded by highly transitive clauses the attention of the speaker and the addressee is likely to be focused either on the action expressed by the verb or on the object argument, which is affected by the action, and hence subject pronoun usage would not be frequent in such clauses. In weakly transitive clauses the attention is more likely to be focused on the referent of the subject argument, as the action expressed by the verb is presented as non-concluded or backgrounded and is less likely to affect the object argument. Thus a higher frequency of subject pronouns would be expected in the less transitive clauses and a lower frequency in the more transitive clauses, where the action or the object are in the focus of attention. Note that ‘‘focus of attention’’ is here defined differently from what is understood by the term ‘‘focus’’ in such approaches as Centering theory (Grosz et al., 1995; Taboada, 2002) that considers focus from a textual perspective. Focus is defined at the clausal level as an attribute of the entity that is likely to be at the centre of attention in a particular clause. As my analysis is carried on at the clausal level, I do not consider the effects of previous or following foci to the selection of focus in a given clause. This is because I consider first and second person singular referents to be likely candidates for the focus position by virtue of their being present in the conversational situation. 3.2. Data selection The corpus chosen consists of the oral texts registered in Spain included in the Corpus de Referencia del Espan˜ol Actual (CREA; the selection used is henceforth referred to as CREA-O7). The CREA-O includes both informal conversational data from face-toface situations and TV and radio programs. Although different registers are included, a common denominator of the material is that it consists of unplanned and unedited oral texts. The selection of data can naturally be criticized for including material from a too wide range of different situations, thus not being really representative of any particular register or situation of language use. Unfortunately it is not possible to be very selective with the data because a relatively large corpus is needed in order to get a representative sample for each verb. In order to avoid the eventual effect of person syncretism and aspect, only occurrences of verbs in the present of indicative are studied. Comparisons of different oral genres and tenses will be left to further research. The verbs studied were selected among the most frequently occurring verbs in written and oral data (cf. Davies, 2006) avoiding highly polysemous verbs. The verbs chosen are listed in Table 6, showing the number of occurrences of each verb form in the corpus. As Table 6 shows, there are considerable differences in the frequencies of the different verbs in the first and second person singular (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984). The frequent use of the verbs estar ’be’ and ir ‘go’ in both persons is explained by their use as auxiliaries. Due to the egocentric nature of human interaction it is not surprising that the number of first person singular verb forms is three times higher than the number of second person singular verb forms. However, a great deal of this difference is caused by the effect of such verbs as creer ‘think, believe’8 and decir ‘say’. The verb form creo ‘I think’ is used almost 17 times more often than the verb form crees ‘you think’. The functions of these two forms in discourse are different: the first person
7 The oral subcorpus represents 10% of the data in the entire CREA corpus and contains approximately 9 million word forms from 1600 documents. These data come from Spain (50%) and other Spanish-speaking countries (50%). Only the data from Spain were used in this study. 8 The verb creer is used in the sense ‘believe’ with a prepositional object (e.g. Creo en ti. ‘I believe in you.’) while in the sense ‘think’ it is most often followed by a complement clause introduced by the complementizer que (e.g. Yo creo que. . . ‘I think that’): out of the 6636 occurrences of creo in CREA-O, 5103 are immediately followed by que.
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Table 7 Subject pronoun frequency in first person singular (of 100 occurrences).
pienso creo entiendo soy estoy hago veo quiero pongo digo vengo voy doy siento
‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I
think’ think, I believe’ understand’ am’ am’ make, I do’ see’ want’ put’ say’ come’ go’ give’ feel, I am sorry’
Frequency/100
Role
Focus
59 55 43 41 31 31 31 30 28 25 22 16 14 13
Cognizer Cognizer Cognizer S S Agent Perceptor Cognizer Volitioner Agent Dictionera S S Agent (ditransitive) Emoter
Subject Subject Subject Subject Complement Object Object Subject Object Object Object Action Subject Action Object Dative Object
a The label Dictioner is suggested for the subject of the verb decir ‘say’ instead of Agent, as the act of saying something is semantically different from more prototypical transitive actions including an Agent subject.
singular form is used to express the speaker’s subjective or epistemic stance towards a proposition while the second person singular form is not used to convey subjectivity (cf. Benveniste, 1966:263–264; Scheibman, 2001:65; Thompson, 2002). In a similar manner, the verb form digo ‘I say’ is typically not used to refer to a concrete act of the speaker saying something to someone but rather to mark the speaker’s stance (cf. section 4.8), while the verb form dices ‘you say’ is used to inquire what the addressee says about something (e.g. dices que. . .? ‘are you saying that. . .?’). Due to these different functions of some verbs, the first and second person singular should not be merged into one category (as in Enrı´quez, 1984). After selecting the verbs, I used the query filter provided with the CREA online corpus to select a sample of 150–200 occurrences of each verb. All the occurrences selected were analyzed manually and contexts where subject pronoun usage or omission was considered obligatory (cf. section 2.1) were discarded, as were the cases where the verb in question formed part of an idiom (e.g. the expression dar la vuelta ‘turn around’, literally ‘give the turn’ was not included in the sample of the verb dar ‘give’). Auxiliary uses of certain verbs (e.g. ir ‘go’, estar ‘be’) were also excluded. After this checking, the first one hundred occurrences were included in the final sample. This sampling method differs fundamentally from the previous studies, where the frequencies have been calculated on the basis of all occurrences of verbs in a given amount of text. Selecting the sample on a random basis from a bigger corpus permits the creation of equal-sized and commensurate samples on each verb independently of the frequency of the verb lexeme in the corpus. The sampling method also minimizes the effect that any single text of the corpus might have on the results. This is important because the frequency of subject pronouns can vary significantly between different texts (cf. Posio, 2008:38[10_TD$IF]–39) and might also be subject to a priming effect in texts or segments of texts (cf. Travis, 2007) not directly related to semantic factors. ?
4. Results and discussion The samples of one hundred occurrences per verb were analyzed manually for the subject pronoun frequencies. The results for first person singular are shown in Table 7; second person singular is discussed in section 4.9. The fourth column of the table (Role) contains the semantic role of the subject (defined and labelled according to the criteria of Posio, 2008; cf. section 2.2.1). The fifth column (Focus) lists those elements9 that are likely to be at the focus of attention in the clauses containing the verb given in the first column (cf. section 3.1). The Pearson’s Chi-square test applied to the frequencies presented in Table 7 shows that there is an extremely significant correlation between the verb lexeme and the frequency of subject pronouns in the samples (the expected frequency for all verbs is 31.36, x2 = 119.27, p < 0.001, N = 1400). However, a closer scrutiny of the Chi-square components and the relationship between the observed and expected frequencies (cf. Arppe, 2008:82) reveals that this result is mostly affected by the four verbs scoring the highest frequency (pienso, creo, entiendo, and soy) and the four verbs having the lowest frequency (vengo, voy, doy, and siento) that contribute to 98% of the Chi-square statistics of the whole table. The frequencies attested with the verbs situated between these two extremes (estoy, hago, veo, quiero, pongo, and digo) fall into a range too close to the expected frequency to show correlation between the verb lexeme and the frequency of subject pronouns. The common denominator of verbs associated with frequent use of subject pronouns (pienso, creo, entiendo, soy) seems to be their stativity: they include cognitive verbs and the verb ser ‘be’, while the verbs that are seldom used with a subject pronoun (vengo, voy, doy, siento) express more dynamic actions, with the exception of the verb sentir ‘feel, be sorry’. This resembles the results obtained by Enrı´quez (1984:244–245; cf. section 2.2.1). A parallelism can also be established between the connection of 9 I use the conventional grammatical labels of subject (defined as the argument that triggers person agreement on the verb) and object (defined as the second argument of two-argument verbs) instead of A, S and O, nevertheless reserving the term S to refer to the semantic role of the subject of one-argument verbs.
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subject pronoun usage to stativity vs. dynamicity and Silva-Corvala´n’s (1997:126) observation that subject pronoun usage is less frequent in the tenses and moods expressing dynamic and foregrounded action as opposed to stative and backgrounded action (cf. section 3.1). Although no clear-cut correlation seems to emerge between the level of transitivity and subject pronoun frequency in these three categories, a closer scrutiny of the samples reveals that some generalizations across the different verbs can be made in terms of their transitivity. These generalizations are discussed in sections 4.1[– ]FI$DT1_ 4.9, where examples of the verb samples are analyzed qualitatively in order to complement and interpret the quantitative results. 4.1. Verbs with Cognizer subjects: pensar, creer, and entender As Table 7 shows, in the first person singular those verbs that have a Cognizer subject and typically take complement clauses as their objects10 have clearly the highest frequencies of subject pronoun usage. With the verbs pensar ‘think’ and creer ‘believe, think’, it is actually more frequent to use the pronoun than to omit it (the frequency of pronoun expression being 59/100 and 55/100, respectively). The third verb on the list, entender ‘understand’ differs from the first two: while creer and pensar used in the first person of singular express the speaker’s stance towards the propositional content of the complement clause, entender refers only to the fact of understanding what is expressed in the complement clause. This is reflected by the lower frequency of subject pronouns with this verb (49/100) than with the other cognitive verbs. In Enrı´quez (1984) and Ferna´ndez Soriano (1999) it is assumed that the verbs that are used to express opinions are used in contrastive contexts more often than other verbs. However, clearly contrastive uses have been excluded from my sample, and it is difficult to interpret the subject pronouns examined here as primarily contrastive. Rather, it seems that the fragments yo creo que and yo pienso que ‘I think that’ are formulaic sequences, analyzable as ‘‘routinized expressions that personalize and organize the speaker’s contribution’’ (Scheibman, 2001:75), where the subject pronoun is present more often than not and does not indicate contrast or emphasis per se. The use of the verbs creer and pensar with a subject pronoun is exemplified in (5) and (6): (5)
Yo creo I
believe.1SG.PRES.IND
que
esto es
COMPL
this be.3SG.PRES.IND very interesting
muy interesante para charlar y PRE
talk
and
para discutir. PRE
discuss.INF
‘I think that this is very interesting to talk and discuss Es
decir, por un lado, yo creo
be.3SG.PRES.IND say.INF
one side I
PRE
believe.1SG.PRES.IND
que
Taciana sen˜alo´
COMPL
signal.3SG.PRET.IND
I mean, on the one hand, I think that Taciana signalled ?
e
enormemente, con mucho rigor, la diversidad, no?, de la situacio´n de las mujeres.
and enormously
PRE
much rigor
DET
diversity
NEG
PRE DET
situation
PRE DET
women
and enormously, very rigorously, the diversity in the situation of the women.’ CREA-O Coloquio tras conferencia, Madrid, 07/05/91 (6)
Estoy
co´mo soy.
encantado de enterarme
be.1SG.PRES.IND delighted
PRE
Pero yo pienso
find.out.INF:1SG.REFL how be.1SG.PRES.IND but I
think.1SG.PRES.IND
‘I am delighted to find out how I am. But I think que tu´
y
se´
that you and know.1SG.PRES.IND
he
leı´do,
no se´
AUX.1SG.PRES.IND
read.PART.PERF
NEG
si
know.1SG.PRES.IND if
that you and I know, I have read, I don’t know if es
verdad, que
be.3SG.PRES.IND truth
no te
COMPL NEG
vas
2SG.REFL go.2SG.PRES.IND
nunca ma´s.
a
casar
PRE
marry.INF never more
it is true that you are never going to marry again.’ CREA-O Hola Raffaella, 28/01/93, TVE 1 Verbs taking Cognizer subjects and complement clauses can be characterized as weakly transitive. They have only one referential argument (the subject), while the other argument (the complement clause) is a non-referential entity that cannot be affected in any ways by the action realized by the subject’s referent. In other words, there is only a cognitive relation between the arguments and no affectedness relation. Thompson (2002) argues against the traditional analysis of complement clauses as clausal arguments and their matrix sentences as transitive main clauses. She considers clauses such as I think (that) as 10
In Weber and Bentivoglio (1991), (92)% of the object arguments of the verbs pensar and creer were complement clauses.
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epistemic/evidential fragments that are used by the speaker to express her stance towards the proposition presented in the ‘‘complement clause’’, which is actually best analyzed as a non-subordinated independent clause.11 This analysis attributes an even lower transitivity level to the clauses with Cognizer subjects. Non-referential entities such as complement clauses are not semantically salient participants, if saliency is defined semantically as ‘‘focus upon the object’s12 being ‘visibly affected’’’ and pragmatically as ‘‘focus upon the object’s being an ‘important topic in the communication’’’ (Givo´n, 1984:171). The low saliency of one participant allows more attention to be paid to the other participant of the clause, in this case the Cognizer subject. In sentences with a first person singular Cognizer subject and a complement clause, the subject is conceptually a starting point (cf. Chafe, 1994) through which the contents of the complement clause can be accessed. Further indication of the low salience and non-object status of complement clauses is provided by Delbecque (2000) who observes that the cliticization of complement clauses is more restricted than that of object nominals. Although the verb creer in principle does permit the cliticizing of the complement clause, unlike some other verbs selecting for complement clauses (Delbecque, 2000:176), in my sample the verb creer occurs only twice with the object clitic lo and the verb pensar only once.13 In order to be cliticized, the object must be definite, familiar, and specific (cf. Delbecque, 2000:158) and as such it is also likely to be at the focus of attention, whereas a complement clause is not. Although the verbs creer and pensar most often occur with a subject pronoun, an interesting question is whether the presence of the pronoun affects the interpretation of the verb in some systematic way. Davidson (1996:559) argues that the function of the subject pronoun yo is to add pragmatic weight to an utterance (cf. section 2.2.2) and that the verb creer would acquire a more concrete, truth-functional meaning when used with the subject pronoun. Thus yo creo would more likely refer to believing something or thinking about something in concrete or, if given a speech act reading, it would mean more or less ‘I claim that’, while creo without the subject pronoun would be used as an epistemic parenthetical. Although Davidson’s (1996:558) example seems to support this interpretation, my data do not provide evidence in favour of such a generalization. There are no systematic differences in the contexts of occurrence of these verbs with and without subject pronouns and it is difficult to see how the presence of yo in examples like (5) would make the meaning of the verb more concrete and truth-functional. However, such an effect does seem to be found with the verb querer ‘want’ (cf. section 4.7[12_TD$IF]). 4.2. One-argument verbs ser, estar, ir, and venir After the verbs with a Cognizer subject, the next highest frequencies are found in the one-argument verbs ser and estar. The verb ser is used as a copula with complements that express properties or qualities inherent in the subject’s referent and with the preposition de to express the origin or material of the referent, estar is used to express location (both concrete and metaphoric, e.g. temporal) or as a copula with adjective complements that express states or changes of state that are not inherent in the referent of the subject. It is thus not surprising that subject pronouns are used more often with the verb ser, as in clauses containing this verb the attention is more likely to be focused to the subject argument than to the complement. This is especially noticeable in examples like (7) and (8), where the verb ser is used to characterize the speaker: (7)
Bueno, de entrada PART
PRE
yo soy
entrance I
ası´,
siempre he
be.1SG.PRES.IND like.this always
tenido
AUX.1SG.PRES.IND
este aspecto,
have.PART.PERF this look
‘Well, to begin with I am like this, I have always have had this look, no me NEG
considero
1SG.REFL consider.1SG.PRES.IND
ni
guapo,
ni
feo, ni
nada.
NEG
handsome
NEG
ugly
nothing
NEG
I don’t consider myself handsome or ugly or anything.’ CREA-O Un dı´a es un dı´a, 20/09/90, TVE 1 (8)
Entonces yo le then
I
dije:
pero digo
yo soy
3SG.DAT say.1SG.PRET.IND but say.1SG.PRES.IND I
cato´lica y
be.1SG.PRES.IND catholic and
‘Then I said to him: but I say I am catholic and no puedo NEG
coger
can.1SG.PRES.IND take.INF
un marido DET
musulma´n.
husband muslim
I can not take a Muslim husband.’ CREA-O Un dı´a es un dı´a, 20/09/90, TVE 1
11
Cf. also Benveniste (1966:264) who expresses the same idea using slightly different concepts. The term ‘‘object’’ does not refer to the grammatical object of a clause but is rather used as a synonym of ‘‘entity’’. 13 With the verb pensar, it is actually more usual to refer to the complement clause by the adverb ası´ ‘like that’. The clauses lo pienso and pienso ası´ also differ in meaning: the first could be rendered into English as ‘I am thinking about it’ and the latter ‘I think so’. 12
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In clauses where the verb estar is used, the attention is more likely to be focused on the complement, as it refers to a state that is not inherent in the referent of the subject argument, such as the adjective seguro ‘sure’ in example (9). Example (10) illustrates the tendency to use the subject pronoun more frequently with the verb ser and less frequently with the verb estar, which is here used in the sense of ‘accompanying someone’. In this example, both verbs ser and estar are repeated, but this repetition has no effect on the subject pronoun usage: ser is used with a pronoun and estar without a pronoun: (9)
Aunque hace
rato
que no le
although make.3SG.PRES.IND moment that
NEG
escuchamos,
estoy
seguro
3SG.DAT hear.1PL.PRES.IND be.1SG.PRES.IND sure
Although we haven’t heard from him for some time, I am sure que permanece
en lı´nea desde El Cairo, Antonio Alonso.
that stay.3SG.PRES.IND
PRE
line from
that he stays on line from Cairo, Antonio Alonso.’ CREA-O Las cosas como son en el Mundo, 05/02/91, Madrid, RNE (10)
Hombre, ahı´
de las que este´n
yo no yo no soy
there I
PART
NEG
I
NEG
be.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE DET
todo el dı´a
that be.3PL.PRES.SUBJ all
DET
day
‘Well, I am not one of those women who are all day ahı´
estoy
contigo. Yo no soy
there be.1SG.PRES.IND with.you I
de esas que estoy
be.1SG.PRES.IND
NEG
PRE
todo el
those that 1SG.PRES.IND all
DET
dı´a [. . .] day
there I am with you. I am not one of those women that are all day. . .’ CREA-O Conversacio´n 6, Universidad de Alcala´ de Henares However, the difference between ser and estar is not abrupt, the subject pronoun frequency being 41/100 in ser and 31/100 in estar. A greater difference is found between these two verbs and the verbs ir ‘go’, where the frequency is only 16/100, and venir ‘come’, with a frequency of 22/100. The verbs ir and venir express more dynamic and salient action than the stative verbs ser and estar. They also favour the focusing of attention on the goal of the motion or on the starting point, as in example (11), where no subject pronoun is used: ?
(11)
visto
AUX.2SG.PRES.IND
see.PART.PERF this morning
Has
esta man˜ana el
atasco
DET
Extremadura que
traffic.jam
COMPL
vengo come.1SG.PRES.IND
‘Have you seen this morning the traffic jam [in] Extremadura, as I come ?
de Mo´stoles, con la huelga de los trenes, no? PRE
with
DET
strike
PRE DET
trains
NEG
from Mo´stoles, with the railway strike?’ ˜ eros de trabajo, Madrid, 20/05/91 CREA-O Juzgado, conversacio´n entre compan The verb ir ‘go’ can express motion towards any point different from the speaker’s location, in which case the attention is focused on the goal of the motion and not on the speaker. The example (12) illustrates the use of the verb ir without a subject pronoun: ?
(12)
Que´ sueles
hacer en el tiempo libre? Pues voy
what use.to.1SG.PRES.IND do.INF
PRE DET
time
free
PART
go.1SG.PRES.IND
al
cine,
PRE.DET
cinema
‘What do you use to do in your free time? Well, I go to the movies veo
alguna pelı´cula en el vı´deo, leo
see.1SG.PRES.IND some film
PRE DET
video read.1SG.PRES.IND much
watch some film on the video, I read a lot, and go out con los amigos. with
DET
mucho, eso, y
friends
with my friends.’ CREA-O Grupo G 11, Geografı´a e Historia
salir
this and go.out.INF
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Hopper and Thompson (1980:254) discuss only briefly the transitivity of one-argument verbs. As in their view the number of arguments is only one component of transitivity, it is justified to consider verbs referring to telic, punctual and volitional actions (e.g. ‘going somewhere’) as more transitive than verbs expressing atelic, non-punctual and non-volitional states (e.g. ‘being something’). Both stativity and dynamicity can be considered components of transitivity.14 The more dynamic verbs ir and venir thus encode events that are higher in transitivity than the events encoded by the more stative verbs ser and estar, as the verbs ir and venir typically express salient, observable and punctual action compared to the more stative verbs ser and estar. As is the case with verbs with Cognizer subjects, lower transitivity thus seems to favour subject pronoun usage. 4.3. The three-argument verb with Agent subjects: dar The verb dar ‘give’ has a relatively low subject pronoun frequency (14/100). It is a three-argument verb capable of taking a subject, an object and a dative argument. The use of dar is illustrated by example (13), where both a pronominal direct object and a pronominal indirect object are present: Yo es I
be.3SG.PRES.IND
aquı´ una coleccio´n.
que
tengo
COMPL
have.1SG.PRES.IND here
DET
!
(13)
Pero era be.3SG.IMP.IND
collection but
‘I have here a collection. But I had to da´rsela
pero es
que si se
la
doy
give.INF:3SG.DAT:3SG.ACC but be.1SG.PRES.IND that if 3SG.DAT 3SG.ACC give.1SG.PRES.IND give it to him, but it is that if I give it to him me
quedo
sin
nada!
1SG.REFL stay.1SG.PRES.IND without nothing I’ll have nothing left for me.’ CREA-O Empresa, conversaciones telefo´nicas, Madrid, 18/03/91 The pronominal arguments are obligatorily placed in the preverbal position and thus compete for that place with the subject pronoun, but unlike the subject, the object and dative arguments cannot be omitted. In example (14), there is a topicalized negative adverbial phrase ahora tampoco ‘not now, either’ that takes the preverbal position. The example comes from a situation where a teacher is trying to make a group of pupils calm down in order to give them their grades: (14)
Pero si no os calla´is but if
NEG
ahora tampoco os
2PL shut.up.2PL.PRES.IND now
NEG
las
doy,
ahora,
2PL.DAT 3PL.ACC give.1SG.PRES.IND now
‘But if you don’t shut up, I won’t give you them now either, now, no se NEG
3SG.REFL
ha
terminado
la clase.
AUX.3SG.PRES.IND
end.PART.PERF
DET
class
the class hasn’t ended.’ ˜ anza, clase de Bachillerato, Madrid, 18/12/91 B CREA-O Centro de ensen It is possible that in both (13) and (14) the presence of other elements in the preverbal position reduces the probability of a preverbal subject pronoun, and placing the subject after the verb would trigger an unwanted contrastive interpretation. In this example the use of a subject pronoun would also be pragmatically unmotivated, as speaker is probably aiming at highlighting the negative adverbial phrase ahora tampoco and not his own person. As mentioned at the end of section 4.1, the fact that the object and the dative arguments can be cliticized in (13) and (14) can be seen as an indication of their being at the focus of attention. Although the basic meaning of the verb dar refers to the three-participant event where ‘somebody gives something to someone’, this is clearly not the most common use of the verb in my data. While idiomatic expressions that make use of this verb were not included in the sample, it is often difficult to draw the line between metaphorical and concrete uses of the verb in the case of such expressions as examples (15) and (16). Although ‘give the phone number’ in (15) might refer to a more concrete event than ‘give one’s opinion’ in (16) such as passing a piece of paper to someone, in their context both expressions refer to the event of saying something to the addressee:
14 Even though Hopper and Thompson (1980:252) do not include the stative vs. dynamic distinction in their original list of transitivity components, it is closely related to such notions as kinesis (action vs. non-action), aspect (telic vs. atelic) and punctuality (punctual vs. non-punctual).
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(15)
Si quieres,
te
el tele´fono
doy
if want.2G.PRES.IND 2SG.DAT give.1SG.PRES.IND
DET
telephone
789
de Antonio. PRE
‘If you want, I give you Antonio’s phone number.’ CREA-O Conversacio´n telefo´nica, Madrid, 04/12/91 B (16)
Entonces, yo le then
I
doy
3SG.DAT give.1SG.PRES.IND
mi opinio´n.
a
usted
PRE
2.SG.HON my opinion
‘Then I give you my opinio´n.’ CREA-O La Luna, 21/11/89, TVE 1 As a matter of fact, the majority of the examples in the sample on dar are more-or-less metaphoric instances of ‘giving’ such as dar pistas ‘give clues’, dar un beso ‘give a kiss’, dar su opinio´n ‘give ones opinion’, dar clases ‘give classes’, dar publicidad ‘make publicity’ dar entrevistas ‘give interviews’, etc. Only 33 of the 100 examples refer to a concrete act of giving something to someone. Such concrete giving events are high in transitivity and low in subject pronoun frequency, as the presence of two other participants and the fact that the verb expresses salient action decreases the likelihood of focusing attention to the subject. Although most of the metaphorical uses of the verb dar are less transitive, they have the same three-participant structure. As dar is semantically a low-content verb, the object and dative arguments are also crucial to the meaning of the clause and therefore likely to be at the focus of attention and, consequently, to be cliticized. 4.4. Two-argument verbs with Emoter subjects: sentir, amar, temer, and disfrutar The verb verb sentir ‘feel, be sorry’ has a subject pronoun frequency of 13/100. Emoter subjects thus seem to be associated with a low frequency of subject pronouns despite occurring in events that are low in transitivity (cf. also Posio, 2008, in press). The encoding of Emoters as subjects is rare in general: they are usually encoded as dative arguments, while the stimulus of emotion is encoded as the subject. In the relatively rare case that Emoters become subjects, they are typically not salient enough to trigger subject pronoun usage. Emoters are atypical subjects in that they are affected (rather than affecting) participants that do not instigate volitional actions (cf. Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 2005:23). However, Emoters are subject-like both syntactically, as they typically occupy the same preverbal position as subjects even if they are encoded as datives, and semantically, because their referents are usually animate, human and definite. The low subject pronoun frequency associated with Emoters indicates that in events involving an Emoter subject the attention is focused more on the source of the emotion, even in the case that the experiencer of the emotion becomes the subject of the clause. An example of the verb sentir is given in (17): (17)
Eso nos
pasa
that 1PL.DAT happen.3SG.PRES.IND
a
todos. Pero siento
PRE
all
but feel.1SG.PRES.IND
sobre todo, PRE
everything
‘That happens to all of us. But I feel, above all siento
un gran respeto por las personas que lo
feel.1SG.PRES.IND
DET
big respect
PRE DET
son
persons that 3SG.ACC be.3PL.PRES.IND
I feel great respect to the people that are that y
lo
dicen [. . .]
and 3SG.ACC say.3PL.PRES.IND and who say it . . .’ CREA-O Grupo G 1, Filologı´a Hispa´nica In order to check whether the low frequency of subject pronoun usage is a property of verbs that take Emoter subjects in general and not just of the verb sentir, I examined another sample of verbs with Emoter subjects. The results, given in Table 8, indicate that the use of subject pronouns is relatively rare with the verbs of this category, independently of whether their objects are clausal complements or nominals. Table 8 Subject pronoun frequency with verbs taking Emoter subjects.
amo temo disfruto Total
‘I love’ ‘I fear’ ‘I enjoy’
Frequency
Role
Focus
9/34 8/52 1/16 18/102 (=18%)
Emoter Emoter Emoter
Object Object Object
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790
As can be seen by examining Tables 6 and 8, verbs taking Emoter subjects are relatively rare in the corpus. Their rarity is probably the reason why they have not been analyzed separately in previous studies on the influence of verb semantics and subject pronoun usage, but rather included into other more general categories. 4.5. Two-argument verbs with Agent subjects: hacer and poner The verbs hacer ‘do’ (31/100) and poner ‘put’ (28/100) are the verbs closest to prototypical transitive verbs in the data, as their subjects typically are Agents. The realization of this semantic role involves another participant, the object argument, which is affected by the action instigated by the referent of the subject argument. Note that with the verbs hacer and poner the object arguments cannot be omitted (e.g. Hago la cena.’I make the dinner.’ *Hago. *‘I make’). The verb poner also involves a third participant expressing location (cf. Pongo el libro en la mesa. ‘I put the book to the table.’ *Pongo el libro. *‘I put the book.’). The verbs hacer and poner thus differ syntactically from verbs with Cognizer subjects that can be used without an object argument (e.g. No creo. ‘I don’t think so’, Entiendo. ‘I understand’). This difference is semantically motivated: verbs like hacer, poner, and dar are low-content verbs that only acquire a full meaning when used with an object argument. In example (18), a subject pronoun is used with the verb form soy ‘I am’ but not with the verb hago ‘I make’: (18)
Claro, yo soy
feliz
ahora haciendo sopas, si son
para seis,
be.1SG.PRES.IND happy now make.GER soups if be.3PL.PRES.IND
clear I
PRE
six
‘Of course, I am happy making soups if they are for six, si son if
para siete, si son
BE.3PL.PRES.IND PRE
para ocho. Y
seven if be.3PL.PRES.IND
PRE
hago
eight and make.1SG.PRES.IND
la
cena.
DET
dinner
if they are for seven, if they are for eight. And I make the dinner.’ CREA-O Domicilio particular, conversacio´n familiar, Segovia, 1991 In example (19), no subject pronoun is used with the verb form hago ‘I make’, as the attention is focused on the object argument fotos ‘photos’, which is topical enough to be cliticized in the next clause: (19)
Yo no
me
I
1SG.REFL dedicate.1SG.PRES.IND
NEG
dedico
a
esto, esto a
mı´
PRE
this this
1SG.OBL
PRE
‘I don’t do this for a living, I me
gusta
me
gusta.
1SG.DAT please.3SG.PRES.IND 1SG.DAT please.3SG.PRES.IND like this, I like this. Hago
fotos
y
se
las
ensen˜o
a
make.1SG.PRES.IND photos and 3PL.DAT 3PL.ACC show.1SG.PRES.IND
la gente.
PRE DET
people
I take photos and show them to people.’ ˜ada de proyeccio´n de diapositivas, dirigida a un grupo de ancianos para CREA-O Charla, acompan conmemorar el. . . Example (20) includes three clauses that can be considered of relatively high transitivity because despite of being formally in the present tense they refer to concluded past actions15 that affect the object argument of the clause. Again, no subject pronouns are used, as the attention is focused on the object argument (whose referent is a concrete, affected entity) and on the action (which is factual and concluded), not on the subject: (20)
Entonces a then
la noche en el Chad, esto, voy
PRE DET
night
PRE DET
Chad this go.1SG.PRES.IND
a
cerrar
PRE
close.INF
‘Then at night in Chad I go to close la puerta de mi habitacio´n y DET
door
PRE
my room
and
no tenı´a NEG
have.3/1SG.IMP.IND
ni llave ni NEG
key
NEG
nada, nothing
the door of my room and it/I didn’t even have a key or anything,
15
The interpretation is based on the discourse context and on the presence of two verbs in the imperfect of indicative.
P. Posio / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 777–798
muy pobre todo,
la u´nica silla
entonces cojo grab.1SG.PRES.IND
very poor everything then
791
DET
only chair
everything [was] very poor, then I take the only chair que habı´a that
y
AUX.3SG.IMP.IND
la
detra´s del
pongo
and 3SG.ACC put.1SG.PRES.IND behind
picaporte.
PRE.DET
door.handle
that there was and I put it behind the door handle.’ CREA-O Un dı´a es un dı´a, 20/09/90, TVE 1
4.6. The two-argument verb with Perceptor–Cognizer subjects: ver The verb ver ‘see’ is used in the sample in at least three different meanings. While the verb is considered primarily a perception verb whose subject argument is a Perceptor, another and clearly more common reading for the verb in the sample is one that involves a cognitive process realized by the referent of the subject (sometimes referred to as ‘‘indirect perception’’). In the latter use, the semantic role of the subject is Cognizer rather than Perceptor. While the overall frequency of subject pronouns with ver is 31/100, the two uses of the verb actually show a different pattern of subject pronoun usage: subject pronouns are used more often when the verb has a cognitive reading. Example (21) shows the verb used in a cognitive sense, not referring to the act of perceiving something visually but rather to the way the speakers understand the topic:
Tu´ tienes
?
(21)
alumnos que hagan
you have.2SG.PRES.IND pupils
that make.3PL.PRES.SUBJ
el
tercero,
DET
third
‘Do you have pupils that are in third grade te
encuentras
por ahı´?
2SG.REFL find.2SG.PRES.IND
PRE
there
are you about there?’
Segundo, sı´. second
yes
‘Second grade, yes.’ Tu´ ves
?
que
tienen
el mismo a´nimo? O sea,
you see.2SG.PRES.IND
COMPL
have 3PL.PRES.IND
DET
same spirit
or be.3SG.PRES.SUBJ
que COMPL
‘Do you see that they have the same spirit? I mean, that tienen
las mismas perspectivas. Porque
have.3PL
DET
same
yo lo que veo es
perspectives because I
DET
that see be.3SG.PRES.IND
they have the same perspectives. Because what I see is que
esta´n
COMPL
be.3PL.PRES.IND more unmotivated that
ma´s
desmotivados que.
that they are less motivated than. . .’
Yo veo que
van
I
go.3PL.PRES.IND equal that go.1SG.IMP.IND I
see
COMPL
igual que iba
yo en sus PRE
an˜os.
their years
‘I see that they are acting the same as I did in their age.’ ˜ os, fragmentos no transcritos en el Corpus para el CREA-O Entrevista CSC003, hombre, 22 an ˜. . . estudio del espan In the majority of the examples of ver, the verb is used with such a cognitive reading as in example (21). In those cases where the verb refers to a perception event, the object argument (‘‘what is seen’’) is at the focus of attention of the clause, which decreases the likelihood of subject pronoun usage in these clauses. This is illustrated by the examples (22) and (23)16: 16 An alternative explanation to the absence of subject pronoun in (22) and (23) is that these are sentences with various coreferential subjects. However, coreferential first person singular subjects need not be null.
792
(22)
P. Posio / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 777–798
Entonces he
encontrado esa paz,
AUX.1SG.PRES.IND
then
estoy
aquı´, estoy
trabajando,
find.PART.PERF this peace be.1SG.PRES.IND here be.1SG.PRES.IND work.GER
‘Then I have found this peace, I’m here, I’m working, estoy
al
pu´blico, oigo
al
pu´blico,
PRE.DET
public hear.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE.DET
public
cantando, veo
be.1SG.PRES.IND sing.GER
see.1SG.PRES.IND
I’m singing, I see the public, I hear the public, veo
las crı´ticas.
see.1SG.PRES.IND
DET
critics
I see the critics.’ CREA-O El peor programa de la semana, 08/12/93, TVE 1 (23)
Me
voy
1SG.REFL go.1SG.PRES.IND
a
emocionar
un poco, porque la
PRE
touch.emotionally.INF
DET
veo
little because 3SG.ACC see.1SG.PRES.IND
‘I’m going to go a little emotional, because I see you a usted PRE
y
me
da
pena que
you.POLITE and 1SG.DAT give.3SG.PRES.IND pity
en este momento no este´
COMPL PRE
this moment
NEG
be.3SG.PRES.SUBJ
and I pity that in this momento mi abuela
A´ngela tambie´n aquı´.
my grandmother also
here
my granny Angela isn’t here too.’ !
CREA-O Ay! vida mı´a, 10/06/93, TVE 1 Note that in the cognitive interpretation (cf. example 21), ver selects for clausal complements introduced by que, while in the most prototypical sense of visual perception (cf. examples 22–23) the objects are nominals referring to physical entities. However, the object of visual perception can also be an event encoded by a complement clause (e.g. veo que esta´ lloviendo ‘I see that it is raining’). In such cases it is difficult to distinguish between the perceptive and the cognitive reading and such a difference might be illusory, as ‘‘seeing typically involves categorizing’’ (Lakoff, 1987:127), i.e. the sensory process of seeing something automatically leads to the cognitive process of categorizing the seen object or event. A third reading found for the verb ver in my sample is the sense of ‘seeing/meeting someone’ as in the example (24). It seems that the subject pronoun is most often not used when the verb is used in this sense, but the small the number of examples does not permit to draw any general conclusions. Note that in (25) the object a tu hermana ‘your sister’ is topicalized by a cleft construction, focusing more attention on it than the subject: (24)
A
la que hace
PRE DET
mucho que no veo
who make. 3SG.PRES.IND.ind much that
a
tu
PRE
your sister
NEG
es
see.1SG.PRES.IND be.3SG.PRES.IND
hermana, joder. INTERJECTION
‘Your sister is the one I haven’t seen for a long time.’ CREA-O Conversacio´n 16, Universidad de Alcala´ de Henares
4.7. The two-argument verb with Volitioner subjects: querer The verb querer ‘want’ does not differ from the agentive verbs in terms of its subject pronoun frequency (30/100), which is close to the frequency of 28.17% found by Enrı´quez (1984: 244–245) for volitional verbs. Verbs expressing volition might be likely candidates for a more frequent subject pronoun usage, as volition is a highly interior or subjective activity (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Miyajima, 2000), and verbs expressing volition can take non-referential object arguments such as complement clauses that are not salient participants. However, the frequency of subject pronouns with the verb querer is relatively low. This might be due to the fact that the overt expression of desiring something is a possibly face-threatening act which may cause speakers to avoid excessively salient reference to themselves (Brown and Levinson, 1987:190[15_TD$IF]–198). In addition, many instances of the verb form quiero ‘I want’ used without a subject pronoun in the sample are metatextual expressions where
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the verb querer modifies a speech act verb[16_TD$IF].17 [17_TD$IF] Such expressions are stylistically confined to a relatively formal register, as in example (25) that comes from a television debate: (25)
Porque quiero
adema´s que
indicar
because want.1SG.PRES.IND indicate.INF besides
me
COMPL
parece
muy poco
1SG.DAT seem.3SG.PRES.IND very little
‘Because I want to indicate also that I think it is not no voy NEG
a decir correcto, muy poco justo estar acusando
go.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE
say.INF correct very little fair
be.INF accuse.GER
I won’t say correct but very unfair to be accusing conmigo [. . .]
a unos directivos que estaban PRE DET
directives that be.3PL.IMP.IND with.me
some executives that were with me. . .’ CREA-O Televisio´n, 08/04/91, Telemadrid In more concrete uses of the verb form quiero ‘I want’, the use of subject pronouns is more frequent, as in examples (26) and (27) from more informal contexts than example (25). This indicates that the use of subject pronouns might be conditioned by the formality of the register or situation and the concomitant politeness requirements. Example (26) comes from a telephone conversation where the speakers discuss how many tickets they should get for a spectacle: (26)
enterare´
Me
y
si es
ası´,
1SG.REFL find.out.1SG.FUT.IND and if be.3SG.PRES.IND like.this
pues. PART
‘I’ll find out and if it’s like that, then yo pensaba
el sa´bado
ir
think.1SG.IMP.IND go.INF
I
DET
Saturday
I had thought to go there on Saturday.’
Sı´. Pues. yes
PART
‘Yeah.’
Que
yo quiero
COMPL
I
entrada, Alfonso tambie´n.
want.1SG.PRES.IND ticket
also
‘So I want a ticket and Alfonso, too.’ CREA-O Conversacio´n telefo´nica, Madrid, 04/12/91 B Example (27) comes from a conversation in a bar (although it is not indicated in the transcription, the speakers are probably talking to the waiter): (27)
Yo quiero I
want.1SG.PRES.IND
un mosto. DET
grape.juice
‘I want a grape juice.’
Yo quiero I
want.1SG.PRES.IND
una cerveza. DET
beer
‘I want a beer.’ CREA-O Local pu´blico, conversacio´n entre amigos, Madrid, 07/11/91 To sum up, in its concrete sense the verb querer appears frequently with a subject pronoun, while the pronoun is omitted in abstract and more-or-less conventionalized uses. This is in line with Davidson’s (1996) observation on subject pronoun use with the verbs saber ‘know’ and creer ‘think, believe’. While the verb saber is often used in epistemic parentheticals without a subject pronoun (e.g. the frequent epistemic downtowner no se´ ‘I don’t know, dunno’), the use of the subject pronoun can be 17 The verb querer was not interpreted as an auxiliary in this study, as it does not simply modify the meaning of the verb in infinitive unlike the auxiliaries estar (e.g. estoy indicando ‘I am indicating I indicate’) and ir (e.g. voy a indicar ‘I will indicate I indicate’; cf. quiero indicar ‘I want to indicate’ *‘I indicate’).
794
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interpreted as an indication of ‘‘a less grammaticalized (or abstract) reading of a verb which has through usage acquired several potential interpretations’’ (Davidson, 1996:559). 4.8. The two-argument verb with Dictioner subjects: decir The verb decir ‘say’ has a frequency of subject pronoun usage of 25/100. It resembles the cognitive verbs creer and pensar in that it is used to indicate that what is being said in the complement clause is an opinion expressed by the speaker. Unlike creer and pensar, decir focuses the attention on the proposition contained in its complement clause by referring to the explicit act of uttering the clause, and it would not make sense to distract attention to the subject’s referent by using a subject pronoun. Thus consider example (28): (28)
El proble el problema es DET
probl-
DET
problem be.3SG.PRES.IND
que
eso sı´
que
hace
COMPL
that yes
COMPL
make.3SG.PRES.IND
‘The problem is that it is going to make inoperativa la reunio´n. Por eso te inoperative
meeting
DET
digo
que
that 2SG.DAT say.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE
COMPL
the meeting inoperative. hay
que
mirarse
AUX.3SG.PRES.IND COMPL
primero el proyecto.
look.INF.REFL.3SG first
DET
project
This is why I say to you that one has to look first at the project.’ CREA-O Conversacio´n entre militantes de un partido polı´tico, Madrid, 21/05/91 In example (28), the function of the fragment te digo que ‘I say that’ is to draw the attention of the addressee to what is being said and the reason why it is being said, not to inform him of the mere fact that the speaker is saying something to him or that it is the speaker who is saying something. Another use of the verb form digo ‘I say’ is to correct an eventual false interpretation of what the speaker has said or is about to say. This is illustrated by example (29): (29)
Ha
sido
sı´, es
era
era
bueno,
AUX.3SG.PRES.IND
be.PART.PERF yes be.3SG.PRES.IND be.3SG.IMP.IND be.3SG.IND.IMP good
‘It has been like this, it was good, but I don’t say that no, no digo NEG NEG
inevitable, pero yo tenı´a
que fuera
say.1SG.PRES.IND that be.3SG.IMP.SUBJ inevitable but I
have.1SG.IMP.IND
it would have been inevitable, but I had bastantes esperanzas en el programa [. . .] many
hopes
PRE DET
program
lots of hope on the program. . .. CREA-O A vivir que son dos dı´as, 02/11/96, Cadena SER The verb form digo appears also with a subject pronoun in the contrastive postverbal position in the expression digo yo, which is used to attenuate a proposition by marking it overtly as an opinion expressed by the speaker, not necessarily shared by the addressee (cf. Stewart, 2000). Thus consider example (30), where digo yo is combined with another discourse marker vamos that also signals reorientation in discourse: [. . .] no tenemos NEG
reloj,
pero, media hora ma´s media hora menos,
have.1PL.PRES.IND watch but
half
hour more half
‘. . . we don’t have a watch, but, half an hour less or more, sera´n
sobre las diez, vamos digo
be.3PL.FUT.IND
PRE
DET
10
PART
yo, no?
say.1SG.PRES.IND I
It’s about ten o’clock, well, isn’t it?’ CREA-O Tariro, tariro, 13/12/88, TVE 1
?
(30)
NEG
hour less
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Table 9 Subject pronoun frequency in second person singular (of 100 occurrences).
crees eres piensas dices esta´s ves pones vas haces quieres vienes das entiendes sientes a
‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you
believe, you think’ are’ think’ say’ are’ see’ put’ go’ make, you do’ want’ come’ give’ understand’ feel, you are sorry’
Frequency/100
Role
Focus
58 36 34 29 24 20 19 14 14 12 11 9 8 1/56a
Cognizer S Cognizer Dictioner S Perceptor Cognizer Agent S Agent Volitioner S Agent Cognizer Emoter
Subject Subject Subject Object Complement Object. Subject Object Action Object Object Action Subject Object Recipient Subject Object
In the 56 clauses found in the corpus and included in the sample, the verb co-occurred with a subject pronoun only once.[21_TD$IF]
The use of the verb form digo is very common in oral discourse (cf. Table 1), but it is mainly used for purposes illustrated in examples (28) to (30), while the propositional use of digo to refer to an actual event of saying something is rare. Such fragments as por eso te digo que, no digo que, and digo yo are recognizable formulaic expressions and the use of subject pronouns is clearly connected to the functions that these fragments have in oral discourse. In many cases the verb form digo is best analyzed as a discourse particle or a formulaic construction (cf. 30) where the presence or absence of the subject pronoun has grammaticalized to a high degree. 4.9. Differences between first and second person singular The second person singular presents some interesting differences in subject pronoun usage with regard to the first person singular (cf. Table 9). The overall frequency of subject pronouns is lower than in the first person, except for the verb creer which is the only verb that has a higher frequency in the second person. The fact that subject pronoun usage is generally most frequent in the first person singular can be attributed to the egocentric nature of discourse. One could also argue that constant use of subject pronouns to refer to the addressee is felt to be too intimidating and that the use of less prominent expressions is a form of negative politeness (as defined in Brown and Levinson, 1987; cf. also Stewart, 2003). As for the first person singular, the Pearson’s Chi-square test applied to the results in Table 9 shows that there is an extremely significant correlation between the verb lexeme and subject pronoun frequency also in the second person singular (the expected frequency for all verbs is 20.71, x2 = 170.05, p < 0.001, N = 1400). This result is mostly due to the four verbs scoring the highest frequencies (crees, eres, piensas, and dices) and the five verbs with the lowest frequencies (quieres, vienes, das, entiendes, and sientes), making up 96% of the Chi-square statistics of the whole table. The subject pronoun frequency with the verbs esta´s, ves, pones, vas, and haces falls into a range too close to the expected frequency to show a correlation between the verb lexeme and the frequency of subject pronouns. The form crees ‘you think/believe’ differs radically from all the other verbs and contributes alone to 50% of the Chi-square statistics of the whole table. The frequent use of the second person singular subject pronoun tu´ with the verb creer ‘think, believe’ is a lexical characteristic of this verb and not of all the verbs with Cognizer subjects, as the verbs pensar ‘think’ and entender ‘understand’ have considerably lower subject pronoun frequencies. While the ranking of the verbs is relatively similar in the first and second person singular, two verbs manifest a different pattern, namely entender ‘understand’ and querer ‘want’ Both have a relatively higher frequency in the first person singular (43/100 and 30/100, respectively) and a lower frequency in the second person singular (8/100 and 12/100, respectively). This is probably due to the fact that in the second person singular these verbs are used mainly in questions, where attention is not focused on the referent of the subject but rather on the polarity or on the object argument. When the subject pronoun is used with the forms entiendes and quieres, it is typically in contexts where personal involvement of the addressee is at stake (cf. Davidson, 1996), as in examples (31) and (32): Jama´s he never
AUX.1SG.PRES.IND
insultado
a nadie.
insult.PART.PERF
PRE
[. . .] Es
nobody
‘I have never insulted anybody. [. . .] It’s a. . . who. . . ?
que´ entiendes
tu´
what understand.2SG.PRES.IND you
por insultar? PRE
insult.INF
what do you understand by insulting?’ CREA-O El martes que viene, 30/01/90, TVE 1
be.3SG.PRES.IND
un
?
(31)
DET
who
quie´n
796
?
(32)
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Que´ quieres
ser
tu´,
Joselito? Yo, el mejor.
what want.2SG.PRES.IND be.INF you I
DET
best
‘What do you want to be, [little] Jose´? I [want to be] the best.’ CREA-O El martes que viene, 26/02/90, TVE 1 Finally, it has to be recalled that in Spanish the second person singular is used also for generic reference. In some studies it has been pointed out that the frequency of subject pronoun expression is either lower (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Cameron, 1993, for Spanish spoken in Madrid) or higher (cf. Cameron, 1993, for Puerto Rican Spanish) in the generic use than in the referential use, naturally depending on the dialect. However, I will not touch the issue here as the identifying the generic uses of the second person singular in my data is quite problematic. 4.10. Summary of the factors affecting subject pronoun usage This section summarizes briefly the factors affecting subject pronoun usage examined in [18_TD$IF]sections 4.1[19_TD$IF]–4.9. Semantic role of the subject. Subject pronoun usage is most frequent with those verbs whose subject is semantically a Cognizer (pensar ‘think’, creer ‘think, believe’). The least frequent use of subject pronouns is found with the verb sentir ‘feel, be sorry’, whose subject is semantically an Emoter. While attention tends to be focused on Cognizer subjects, in clauses with Emoter subjects it is focused on the stimulus of emotion. Number of arguments and transitivity. Subject pronouns are used less often with agentive verbs that select referential object arguments and not complement clauses (dar ‘give’, poner ‘put’, hacer ‘make, do’). With these verbs the syntactically obligatory object argument is likely to be at the focus of attention. Omitting the subject pronoun allows more attention to be focused on the object, the dative or locative argument. One-argument verbs included in the study can be divided in two groups: subject pronoun usage is rare with the more dynamic verbs ir ‘go’ and venir ‘come’ but frequent with the stative verbs ser ‘be’ and estar ‘be’. With dynamic verbs, attention is focused on the action expressed by the verb, while with the stative verbs the subject is more often at the focus of attention (cf. Silva-Corvala´n, 1997, 2001). However, rather than transitivity itself, it is the concomitant focusing of attention that affects the use of subject pronouns. Verb-specific factors. With some verbs, the presence or absence of the subject pronoun is dependent on the reading given to the verb. This is the case with the verb querer ‘want’, with which the use of the subject pronoun is connected to a more concrete meaning, while the subject pronoun tends to be left out when the verb is used in speech act formulae (cf. Davidson, 1996). With the verb ver ‘see’, subject pronoun usage is more frequent when the verb is used in a cognitive as opposed to sensory reading. With the verb decir ‘say’, the use and position of the subject pronoun depends on the discourse function of the verb and whether more attention is focused on the complement clause or the subject. Finally, with low-content verbs such as dar ‘give’, hacer ‘do, make’, and poner ‘put’, the object argument is largely responsible for the meaning of the clause, and therefore it is likely to be at the focus of attention. First vs. second person singular. The main differences attested between the first and second person singular can be attributed to the fact that a great deal of second person verb forms are used in questions. In polar questions, subject pronoun usage is rare because attention is focused on the polarity. In questions concerning the addressee’s personal commitment (e.g. with the verb creer ‘think, believe’), subject pronoun usage is more frequent. 5. Conclusions The goal of this paper was to deepen the understanding of the use of subject pronouns in Peninsular Spanish by examining the use of subject pronouns in connection with different verbs and by considering the influence of semantic factors on subject pronoun usage, applying both quantitative and qualitative methodology. The traditional explanation according to which subject pronouns are used to express contrast and emphasis has proved to be insufficient, as it accounts for a very small proportion of the cases where subject pronouns are used. As a consequence, the fact that verbs like creer ‘think, believe’ and pensar ‘think’ are used with subject pronouns more frequently than others cannot be solely attributed to the presumed frequent use of such verbs in contexts that favour a contrastive interpretation (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984:245; Ferna´ndez Soriano, 1999). The previous studies on subject pronoun usage have also been unable to account for the differences found between other verbs than those taking Cognizer subjects (i.e. verbs that are ‘‘used to express opinions’’), such as verbs with Emoter or Agent subjects. I suggest that a better way of explaining the different uses of subject pronouns has to do with the focusing of attention on the participants of the event or on the action expressed by the verb. The quantitative analysis carried out reveals that in addition to verbs favouring subject pronoun usage (e.g. creer ‘think, believe’, pensar ‘think’) there are also verbs associated with very infrequent usage of subject pronouns (e.g. sentir ‘feel’, ir ‘go’). In clauses where the verb is in the first or second person singular, low transitivity features favor the focusing of attention on the referent of the subject and thus increase the frequency of subject pronouns, while high transitivity features increase the likeliness of focusing attention either on the action expressed by the verb or on the referent of the object argument. This is reflected by more frequent subject pronoun usage in clauses characterized by lower transitivity. However, rather than transitivity itself, it is the focusing of attention associated with transitivity that affects the use and omission of subject pronouns. The traditional notions of ‘‘emphasis’’ and
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‘‘contrast’’ can also be considered subcases of focusing of attention: when a subject is emphasized or contrasted, more attention is focused on it, which is reflected by the use of a subject pronoun. The use of first and second person subject pronouns to indicate increased pragmatic weight or personal commitment of the speaker or addressee (Davidson, 1996) is also covered by the general notion of focusing of attention. As the qualitative analysis of the examples shows, there are also various other factors affecting subject pronoun usage with different verbs, such as the discourse functions of different verb forms. Many frequent collocations such as yo creopienso que ‘I think that’ or no se´ ‘I don’t know’ that serve to express the speaker’s subjective stance appear to be formulaic constructions, also referred to as prefabs (i.e. a prefabricated chunks) or emergent discourse patterns (cf. e.g. Hopper, 1987; Scheibman, 2001) where the use of the subject pronoun has grammaticalized to a high degree. The use of subject pronouns with different verbs is not governed by categorical rules but rather by soft constraints (cf. Du Bois, 2003) that can be revealed by quantitative analysis. However, in order to present a viable analysis for the uses of Peninsular Spanish subject pronouns, quantitative analysis alone is not enough and considering the discourse-pragmatic functions of different verbs and verb forms used in oral communication is also required. Acknowledgements I am especially grateful to Seppo Kittilä and Angela Bartens for reading and commenting on the manuscript at various stages. Many thanks are also due to Kaius Sinnemäki for his invaluable help with the statistical analysis and to Marja-Liisa Helasvuo and the two anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Pragmatics for their insightful comments and constructive criticism. References Ariel, Mira, 1994. Interpreting anaphoric expressions: a cognitive versus a pragmatic approach. Journal of Linguistics 30, 3–42. Ariel, Mira, 2001. Accessibility theory: an overview. In: Sanders, T., Schilperoord, J., Spooren, W. (Eds.), Text Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 29–87. Arppe, Antti, 2008. Univariate, Bivariate, and Multivariate Methods in Corpus-Based Lexicography—A Study of Synonymy. Helsinki University Press, Helsinki. Bentivoglio, Paola, 1987. Los sujetos pronominales de primera persona en el habla de Caracas. Universidad Central de Venezuela, Consejo de Desarrollo Cientı´fico y Humanı´stico, Caracas. Benveniste, E´mile, 1966. 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Davidson, Brad, 1996. ‘Pragmatic weight’ and Spanish subject pronouns: the pragmatic and discourse uses of ‘tu´’ and ‘yo’ in spoken Madrid Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 26 (4), 543–565. Dixon, R.M.W., 1979. Ergativity. Language 55 (1), 59–138. Davies, Mark, 2006. A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. Core Vocabulary for Learners. Routledge, New York. Delbecque, Nicole, 2000. Cognitive constraints on complement clause cliticization in Spanish. In: Horie, K. (Ed.), Complementation: Cognitive and functional perspectives. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 149–197. Du Bois, John W., 2003. Argument structure: grammar in use. In: Du Bois, J.W., Kumpf, L.E., Ashby, W.J. (Eds.), Preferred Argument Structure: Grammar as Architecture for Function. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 11–60. ˜ ola hablada en Madrid. Instituto Miguel de Cervantes, Madrid. Enrı´quez, Emilia V., 1984. El pronombre personal sujeto en la lengua espan Ferna´ndez Soriano, Olga, 1999. El pronombre personal. Formas y distribuciones. Pronombres a´tonos y to´nicos. In: Bosque, I., Demonte, V. (Eds.), Grama´tica ˜ ola. Volumen 1: Sintaxis ba´sica de las clases de palabras. Espasa Calpe, Madrid, pp. 1209–1273. descriptiva de la lengua espan Ferna´ndez Soriano, Olga, Ta´boas Baylı´n, Susana, 1999. Construcciones impersonales no reflejas. In: Bosque, I., Demonte, V. (Eds.), Grama´tica descriptiva de ˜ ola. Volumen 2: Las construcciones sinta´cticas fundamentales: Relaciones temporales, aspectuales y modales. Espasa Calpe, Madrid, pp. la Lengua Espan 1723–1778. Givo´n, Talmy, 1984. Syntax: A Functional–Typological Introduction. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Grosz, Barbara J., Joshi, Aravind K., Weinstein, Scott, 1995. Centering: a framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics 21 (2), 203–225. Gundel, Jeanette K., Hedberg, Nancy, Zacharski, Ron, 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69 (2), 274–307. Hochberg, Judith G., 1986. Functional compensation for /s/ deletion in Puerto Rican Spanish. Language 62 (3), 609–621. Hopper, Paul J., Thompson, Sandra A., 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56 (2), 251–299. Hopper, Paul J., 1987. Emergent grammar. Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 139–157. ˜ ol colombiano. Hispania 88 (2), 335–348. Hurtado, Luz Marcela, 2005. Condicionamientos sinta´ctico-sema´nticos de la expresio´n del sujeto en el espan Lakoff, George, 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Langacker, Ronald, 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume II. Descriptive Application. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Levin, Beth, Rappaport Hovav, Malka, 2005. Argument Realization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Matos Amaral, Patrı´cia, Schwenter, Scott##A., 2005. Contrast and the (non-) occurrence of subject pronouns. In: Eddington, D. (Ed.), Selected Proceedings of the 7th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, pp. 116–127. ˜ ol. ELUA Estudios de Lingu¨ı´stica 6, 73–88. Meyer-Hermann, Reinhard, 1990. Sobre algunas condiciones pragma´ticas de la posicio´n del sujeto en espan ˜ ol y sema´ntica del verbo. Sophia Linguistica 46–47, 73–88. Miyajima, Atsuko, 2000. Aparicio´n del pronombre sujeto en espan ˜ ol del Caribe: el orden SVO. Anuario de Lingu¨ı´stica Hispa´nica 5, 139–152. Morales, Amparo, 1989. Hacia un universal sinta´ctico del espan ˜ ol de Puerto Rico. Hispania 80, 153–165. Morales, Amparo, 1997. La hipo´tesis funcional y la aparicio´n de sujeto no nominal: el espan
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˜ ol y portugue´s hablados: factores sema´nticos y Posio, Pekka, 2008. Uso del pronombre personal sujeto de la primera persona del singular en espan pragma´ticos [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of Helsinki, Helsinki. ˜ ol y portugue´s. Actes du XVIIe Congrès des Romanistes Posio, Pekka, in press. Influencia del papel sema´ntico en la expresio´n del sujeto pronominal en espan Scandinaves. University of Tampere, Tampere. Ranson, Diana, 1991. Person marking in the wake of /s/ deletion in Andalusian Spanish. Language Variation and Change 3 (2), 133–152. Scheibman, Joanne, 2001. Local patterns of subjectivity in person and verb type in American English conversation. In: Bybee, J., Hopper, P. (Eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 61–89. Silva-Corvala´n, Carmen, 1997. Variacio´n sinta´ctica en el discurso oral: problemas metodolo´gicos. In: Moreno Ferna´ndez, F. (Ed.),Trabajos de Sociolingu¨ı´stica Hispa´nica. University of Alcala´, Alcala´ de Henares, pp. 115–135. ˜ ol. Georgetown University Press, Washington. Silva-Corvala´n, Carmen, 2001. Sociolingu¨ı´stica y pragma´tica del espan Stewart, Miranda, 2000. Hedging your bets – the use of yo in face-to-face interaction. Web Journal of Modern Language Linguistics 4-5, 1999–2000. Stewart, Miranda, 2003. ‘Pragmatic weight’ and face: pronominal presence and the case of the Spanish second person singular subject pronoun tu´. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2), 191–206. Taboada, Maite, 2002. Centering and pronominal reference: in dialogue, in Spanish. In: Bos, Foster, Matheson (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (EDILOG 2002), 4–6 September 2002. Available at http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/edilog/ (consulted on November 19th, 2009). Taboada, Maite, 2005. Anaphoric terms and focus of attention in English and Spanish. In: Butler, C.S., Go´mez Gonza´lez, M., Doval-Sua´rez, S.M. (Eds.), The Dynamics of Language Use: Functional and Contrastive Perspectives. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 197–218. Thompson, Sandra, 2002. ‘Object complements’ and conversation towards a realistic account. Studies in Language 26 (1), 125–163. Travis, Catherine E., 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19 (2), 101–135. Van Valin, Robert D., 2001. An Introduction to Syntax. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Weber, Elizabeth G., Bentivoglio, Paola, 1991. Verbs of cognition in spoken Spanish: a discourse profile. In: Fleischman, S.Waugh, Linda, R. (Eds.), DiscoursePragmatics and the Verb. Routledge, London, pp. 194–213. Pekka Posio is a postgraduate student at the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Helsinki. He is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation on the uses of first person singular subject pronouns and verb forms in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese.
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Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Spanish subject pronoun usage and verb semantics revisited: First and second person singular subject pronouns and focusing of attention in spoken Peninsular Spanish Pekka Posio * Department of Modern Languages, Unioninkatu 40 A, P.O. Box 24, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 7 December 2009 Received in revised form 6 October 2010 Accepted 11 October 2010
A considerable body of literature exists on the use of subject pronouns in Spanish. However, the influence of semantic and pragmatic factors on subject pronoun usage has not been examined thoroughly enough. This paper deals with the frequency and patterns of usage of first and second person singular subject pronouns with [1_TD$IF]14 different verbs in a corpus of spoken Peninsular Spanish. It is argued that the differences attested in subject pronoun usage between the verbs can be explained by the focusing of attention on the clausal participants of the verbs involved (i.e., connected to the semantic role of the subject and the level of transitivity of the clause) and by the discourse functions of the verb forms in question. In addition, some frequently used first person singular verb forms can be analyzed as formulaic sequences which are used to express the speaker’s subjective or epistemic stance. ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Spanish Subject pronoun Semantic role Transitivity Focus First person singular Lexical semantics
1. Introduction The usage and omission of subject pronouns in Spanish has attracted lots of attention and has led to the formation of various theories and explanations related to such factors as disambiguation, switch reference, turn-taking and topicalization (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Hochberg, 1986; Bentivoglio, 1987; Morales, 1989, 1997; Cameron, 1992, 1993; Ranson, 1991; Davidson, 1996; Miyajima, 2000; Ferna´ndez Soriano, 1999; Silva-Corvala´n, 1997, 2001; Taboada, 2002; Stewart, 2003; Hurtado, 2005; Travis, 2007). However, less effort has been put into explaining why the frequency of subject pronouns varies between different verbs, tenses, and moods. This paper aims at providing a functional, clause-level explanation of the differences attested in the use of subject pronouns with different verbs and verb types in spoken Peninsular Spanish. I examine equalsized samples of 14 verbs used in first and second person singular in the present of indicative using data from the Corpus de Referencia del Espan˜ol Actual (CREA). The study is focused on the first person singular, but examples from the second person singular will also be analyzed and contrasted to the first person. I start from the hypothesis that subject pronoun usage reflects a higher level of prominence given to the subject, whereas subject pronouns are used less often when another element is given more attention in the clause. Focusing of attention accounts for several phenomena connected to the use of subject pronouns, such as the differences attested in subject pronoun frequency between different verbs or semantic roles (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Bentivoglio, 1987; Morales, 1997;
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 919128311. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.012
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Miyajima, 2000; Hurtado, 2005; Posio, 2008, in press) and tenses and moods (cf. Silva-Corvala´n, 1997, 2001). Such an explanation accounts also for the contrastive and emphatic contexts where subject pronoun usage is considered obligatory and the use of subject pronouns to increase the ‘‘pragmatic weight’’ of an utterance (Davidson, 1996). The organization of this paper is as follows: in section 2, obligatory and optional usage of subject pronouns is defined and the previous studies are discussed, paying special attention to the studies on semantic factors. In section 3 I present my hypothesis and data. Section 4 contains the results of the quantitative analysis and discussion of the results in the light of qualitative examination of examples. The main findings are summarized briefly in section 5. 2. Variation between null and overt pronominal subjects 2.1. Obligatory and optional usage of subject pronouns The use of independent subject pronouns in Spanish is considered optional in most contexts. Although there is no general agreement regarding the limits of this optionality, there are some clear cases where subject pronouns must be either used or omitted. Subject pronouns cannot be omitted when they serve as antecedents for relative clauses or when they contain focal information[2_TD$IF],1[3_TD$IF] as in the constructed example (1)2: ?
(1)
Quie´n lo
who
hizo?
Lo
yo. *Lo
hice
3SG.ACC do.3SG.PRET.IND 3SG.ACC do.1SG.PRET I
hice.
*3SG.ACC do.1SG.PRET
‘Who did it?’ – ‘I did it.’ The use of subject pronouns is also obligatory in contexts where a contrast is established between two referents[4_TD$IF],3[5_TD$IF] as in the constructed example (2): (2)
Yo hablo I
y
tu´
escuchas.
speak.1SG.PRES.IND and you listen.2SG.PRES.IND
‘I speak and you listen.’ Normative grammar explains subject pronoun usage as a way of emphasizing or contrasting the referent of the subject (cf. Butt and Benjamin, 2004:130), although it is not always clear what is meant by these concepts outside of the obligatory contexts that are rare in normal conversational data. Just to give an example, the 2[6_TD$IF]800 clauses analyzed for the present study contained about 30 clauses where the use of subject pronouns was estimated to be obligatory according to the criteria established above. These sentences were consequently excluded from the analysis. Bentivoglio (1987:48), who studied subject pronoun usage in Venezuelan Spanish found only 36 clearly emphatic subjects4 in her sample of 892 clauses (i.e. 4% of the data), only 20 of which occurred with a subject pronoun (i.e. 2% of the data). The use of constructed examples like (1[8_TD$IF] )–(2) thus sheds little light on actual language usage[9_TD$IF]. ˜ ola (Ferna´ndez Soriano, 1999:1227) gives the example reproduced The descriptive grammar of the Real Academia Espan here as (3) to illustrate a use of subject pronouns described as ‘‘totally impossible’’ given the fact that Spanish is a null subject language: (3)
*Yo me
vestı´
y
despue´s yo fui
I 1SG.REFL dress.1SG.PRET.IND and after
I
go.1SG.PRET.IND
a
recoger
a
mi hijo,
PRE
pick.up.INF
PRE
my son
‘I dressed up and then I went to pick up my son pero yo llegue´ but I
tarde.
arrive.1SG.PRET.IND late
but I arrived late.’ (Ferna´ndez Soriano, 1999:1227)
1 Note that in such contexts the subject pronoun is usually postverbal and clause-final. In spoken Peninsular Spanish, the frequency of postverbal subject pronouns is circa 12% in first person singular (Posio, 2008:37), while the frequency of postverbal NP subjects seems to vary between 18% and 40%, depending on the study (cf. Meyer-Hermann, 1990). The position of subject pronouns relative to the verb will not be focused on in this study. 2 The glossing used in the examples follows the Leipzig Glossing Rules but it is somewhat simplified in regard to aspects that are not relevant for the point illustrated, such as number and gender agreement of determiners and adjectives. Boldface is used to highlight all 1st and 2nd person singular verb forms and pronouns appearing in the examples. 3 Matos Amaral and Schwenter (2005) argue that even in these kinds of contexts the subject pronouns are not obligatory if the utterance contains some other expression referring directly or indirectly to the referent of the subject, such as aquı´ ‘here’, honestamente ‘honestly’, por mi parte ‘for my part’, etc. 4 In Bentivoglio’s (1987) study, only clauses that contained an overt marker of emphasis, such as the word pero ‘but’, mismo ‘self’ (e[23_TD$IF].g. yo mismo ‘myself’), justamente ‘precisely’, etc. were considered emphatic.
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However, it is questionable whether the alleged impossibility of example (3) is due to the presence of subject pronouns per se. It is relatively easy to find similar examples with abundant subject pronoun usage in naturally occurring data. Example (4) is the beginning of a phone call to a television call-in program. The speaker uses the subject pronoun yo with three consecutive verbs, just as in the constructed example (3): (4)
Bueno, pues yo quiero PART
PART
I
decir
que
want.1SG.PRES.IND say.INF
COMPL
‘Well, I want to say that yo estoy I
en contra de la Homeopatı´a, porque
be.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE
against
PRE DET
homeopathy because
I am against homeopathy, because yo hice I
tambie´n un tratamiento de adelgazamiento [. . .]
do.1SG.PRET also
a
treatment
PRE
weight.loss
I have also done a weight loss treatment. . .’ Pasa la vida, 15/02/96, TVE 1 The fact that example (4) is not ‘‘totally impossible’’ suggests that it is not the presence or absence of subject pronouns itself that affects the acceptability of an utterance, but rather the semantic and pragmatic context where the subject pronoun occurs. Example (3) is a narration of past events in the preterite tense that is known to disfavour subject pronoun usage (cf. Silva-Corvala´n, 1997:126 and section 3.1). In example (4), the first two subject pronouns are used with verbs that express the speaker’s subjective stance and the third one with a verb that begins a narration of her personal experience. Although these factors may favour subject pronoun usage, they hardly make it ‘‘obligatory’’. In order to find a satisfactory explanation to subject pronoun presence or absence in real data, one has to look at the semantics and pragmatics of subject pronoun usage and avoid categorical acceptability judgments. 2.2. Explaining optional subject pronoun usage: previous studies A traditional functional explanation argues that subject pronouns serve to disambiguate subject person in those moods and tenses where the first and third person singular have syncretic forms (the imperfect of indicative, the conditional and the subjunctive) or in dialects where the loss of postnuclear /s/ expands the syncretism to the second person singular as well (cf. Hochberg, 1986). However, the relevance of ambiguity avoidance has been questioned in later research (e.g. Ranson, 1991; Cameron, 1992, 1993, 1996). It is unlikely to motivate subject pronoun usage in spoken language, where the referent of the subject is usually made clear by the context (cf. Hurtado, 2005). Cameron (1992, 1993) has shown that ambiguity avoidance interacts with switch reference: simply put, subject pronouns are more frequently used instead of null subjects when the subject is not coreferential with the previous one. Although this is an important explanatory factor, it is not able to account for the differences found in subject pronoun usage between different verbs or semantic roles (cf. section 2.2.1). Subject pronoun usage has also been argued to be sensitive to a priming effect, according to which the use of subject pronouns would attract more subject pronouns and the use of null subjects would attract more null subjects (Travis, 2007). Sociolinguistic factors such as the age, sex, or scholarity of the speakers seem to be fairly irrelevant to tendencies in subject pronoun usage (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Bentivoglio, 1987:57–58; Cameron, 1992; Silva-Corvala´n, 1997:122). Dialectal differences, however, are important, and several studies have shown that the use of subject pronouns is considerably more frequent in Caribbean Spanish than in other varieties (e.g. Morales, 1989; Cameron, 1993). In theories dealing with anaphora and the choice of referring expressions, the use of subject pronouns is considered to indicate a lower level of accessibility or givenness (Taboada, 2005) of the referent than the use of null anaphora (Ariel, 1994:30, 2001:31), which in turn requires that the referent is ‘‘at the current center of attention’’ (Gundel et al., 1993:279). However, the effects of accessibility or givenness have been studied mostly for the anaphoric third person and it is unclear to what extent they apply to first and second person referents that are present in the communicative situation and thus need not be activated in the short-term memory of the speakers. First and second person singular pronouns typically refer to the speaker and the addressee, although they may also be used for generic reference (cf. section 4.9 and Ferna´ndez Soriano and Ta´boas Baylı´n, 1999:1723). They thus differ fundamentally from anaphoric third person pronouns that have a considerably larger range of potential referents that need to be introduced into the discourse. 2.2.1. Previous studies on semantic factors affecting subject pronoun usage The fact that different verbs are associated with different frequencies of subject pronoun usage has been demonstrated in various studies on several Spanish dialects (e.g. Enrı´quez, 1984; Bentivoglio, 1987; Morales, 1997; Miyajima, 2000; Hurtado, 2005; Posio, 2008, in press). However, the findings are not directly commensurate, as the criteria for selecting and classifying the data vary from one study to another. In addition, subject pronoun frequency depends on grammatical person, being
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Table 1 Frequency of subject pronoun expression with different verbs in Enrı´quez (1984). 1. Verbs that express an opinion or judgement of the speaker (like creer ‘believe, think’, considerar ‘consider’, imaginar ‘imagine’): subject pronoun frequency of 54.45% 2. Verbs that express mental activity (like saber ‘know’, querer ‘want’, aprender ‘learn’, imaginar ‘imagine’): subject pronoun frequency of 28.17% 3. Stative verbs that do not express a dynamic process exercised by the subject (like ser ‘be’, estar ‘be’,a tener ‘have’, saber ‘know’, vivir ‘live’): subject pronoun frequency of 22.94% 4. Verbs that express external activity (like hacer ‘do’, traer ‘bring’, decir ‘say’, hablar ‘speak’, ver ‘see’, oı´r ‘hear’, ir ‘go’, venir ‘come’): subject pronoun frequency of 20.00% (Enrı´quez, 1984:244–245) a
The semantic difference between the verbs ser and estar is discussed in section 4.2.
usually highest in the first person singular and lowest in plural persons (Enrı´quez, 1984), which has to be taken into account while comparing the results from different studies. Enrı´quez (1984), in her exhaustive study on subject pronoun frequency in educated speech in Madrid Spanish, found that the semantic properties of verbs affected the frequency of pronominal subjects. In her study, four groups of verbs were distinguished; the frequencies quoted in Table 1 include all grammatical persons. Enrı´quez (1984:244–245) concludes that subject pronoun usage is most frequent with verbs that express interior or subjective activity as opposed to verbs that express exterior or objective activity. Her explanation of this phenomenon is that speakers tend to emphasize the subjects of verbs that are used to express personal opinions. While this explanation accounts for the specific categories used in her study, the categories themselves are somewhat problematic. Firstly, the same verb can be included in two categories, depending on its meaning: the classification seems to be based on both the abstract lexeme of the verb and on the specific meaning of the verb in the context it appears in. Secondly, the categories are defined on the basis of very heterogeneous criteria. For instance, category 4, which contains verbs of ‘‘external activity’’, includes agentive verbs like hacer ‘do’, speech act verbs like decir ‘say’, sensory verbs like oı´r ‘hear’ and one-argument verbs and auxiliaries like ir ‘go’. It is also unclear to what extent the frequency of pronominal subject expression varies among verbs included in one category and what are the proportions of different verbs in one category: for example, one single frequently occurring verb lexeme (e.g. creer ‘think’) might account for a great deal of the higher frequency of subject pronoun presence in category 1. A simple way to avoid these problems would be to analyze equal-sized random samples of each verb lexeme, instead of counting all occurrences of all verbs in a given amount of data, and avoid the use of pre-established verbal categories (cf. section 3.2). However, scholars adopting a quantitative approach to Spanish subject pronoun usage have mostly employed a methodology similar to Enrı´quez (1984) although the definitions of verbal categories vary from one study to another. Bentivoglio (1987), in her study on Venezuelan Spanish, divided verbs into five categories based on Givo´n’s (1984) verb classification: (1) verbs of cognition, mental and modal verbs, (2) perceptive and sensory verbs, (3) verbs of diction, (4) volitional verbs, and (5) all the other verbs. According to Bentivoglio (1987:50–54), the first four groups had the highest rate of subject pronoun usage (53–60%) and the last group, consisting of ‘‘semantically neutral’’ verbs, a significantly lower rate (33%). Thus her conclusion was that only two classes of verbs exist in terms of subject pronoun frequency: (1) verbs of cognition, perception, diction and volition, and (2) all other verbs. Morales (1997) used a slightly different kind of classification in her study on subject pronoun frequency in Puerto Rican Spanish. Morales’s classification and the frequency of subject pronoun usage in the different classes is presented in Table 2. Because of the different classification criteria used, Enrı´quez (1984) includes for example the verb decir ‘say’ in the category of external activity, characterized by a low subject pronoun frequency, while Morales (1997) includes it in the mental and communicative category, characterized by a high subject pronoun frequency. Thus the only common statement that can be made on the basis of the two classifications is that the rather vague category of ‘‘mental verbs’’ seems to be associated with a higher subject pronoun frequency than the others. A similar result was obtained by Hurtado (2005) who used yet another kind of classification in her study on Colombian Spanish, distinguishing (1) cognitive verbs, (2) volitional verbs, (3) stative verbs, and (4) verbs that express external or objective activity. As in the previous studies, the cognitive verbs had the highest frequency of subject pronoun usage. Miyajima’s (2000) study focuses on the six most frequent verbs in her corpus of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Colombian Spanish. The frequencies of subject pronoun usage with these verbs are given in Table 3. Although the Pearson’s Chi-square test applied to Miyajima’s results shows that they are not statistically significant (x2 = 2.5, p = 0.78, N = 439), her interpretation of the results is interesting. She argues that the verbs associated with frequent subject pronoun usage are characterized by the presence of an ‘‘Invisible Agent’’, that is, they are verbs that express action that cannot be witnessed by others, and speakers feel the need to express the instigator of such invisible activities. What this
Table 2 Frequency of subject pronoun expression with different verbs in Morales (1997).
1. 2. 3. 4.
Verbs that express mental and communicative activity Intransitive verbs without adjective predicative Transitive verbs Intransitive verbs in general
1SG and 2SG
3SG and 3PL
47% 37% 33% 33%
41% 9% 25% 16%
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Table 3 Frequency of subject pronoun expression with different verbs in Miyajima (2000).
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
creer querer ver saber hacer poner
Frequency of subject pronouns
Verbs occurring with subject pronoun/total number of verbs in the category
40.9% 35.8% 30.8% 29.6% 25.8% 17.6%
28/53 18/42 11/28 33/91 14/41 20/60 (Miyajima, 2000:76)
Table 4 Frequency of subject pronoun expression with different semantic roles in Posio (2008).
Experiencer
Cognizer Volitioner Perceptor Emoter Agent S Total
Frequency of subject pronouns
Verbs occurring with subject pronoun/Total number of verbs in the category
40.9% 35.8% 30.8% 17.6% 29.6% 25.8% 32.2%
79/193 19/53 12/39 3/17 110/371 48/186 271/859
might suggest is that subject pronoun usage could be more frequent with Experiencer subjects in comparison to Agents, or perhaps with stative verbs as opposed to dynamic verbs. Posio (2008, in press) investigated the relation between the semantic role of the subject and subject pronoun frequency in the first person singular in oral corpora of Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese, using a classification based on the semantic role of the subject. The classification was thus intended to be purely semantic and not lexematic, and thus suitable for a contrastive study. Posio’s (2008) results concerning Peninsular Spanish data are presented in Table 4. The Pearson’s Chi-square test applied to Posio’s (2008) results shows that the differences found in subject pronoun frequency among the different semantic roles are statistically significant (x2 = 13.3, p = 0.02, N = 859). The set of semantic roles used is derived from the division of the subject category into two macro-roles, namely A, the subject of transitive clauses, and S, the subject of intransitive clauses, as defined by Dixon (1979). The macro-role S was left unanalyzed due to the reduced size of the corpus, but the macro-role A was divided further into two major subcategories, Agent and Experiencer, the latter of which was divided into Cognizer, Volitioner, Perceptor, and Emoter (cf. Van Valin, 2001:21–345). Thus Cognizer includes mainly the subjects of verbs that express cognitive events, such as creer ‘believe, think’, but also the subjects of other verbs used in a similar sense, such as ver ‘see’ (cf. section 4.6). The category of Volitioner includes for instance the subjects of the verbs querer ‘want’ and desear ‘desire’. The subject arguments of perceptive verbs such as ver ‘see’, oı´r ‘hear’, escuchar ‘listen’, and mirar ‘look’ were considered Perceptors. The subjects of agentive verbs were categorized as Agents. The subjects of verbs that express emotions or feelings, such as temer ‘fear’ and sentir ‘feel, be sorry’ were classified as Emoters. The high rating of Cognizer and Volitioner in Posio’s (2008) results is predictable on the basis of previous studies (e.g. Enrı´quez, 1984; Miyajima, 2000; Hurtado, 2005). However, Miyajima’s (2000) theory of ‘‘Invisible Agent’’ fails to explain the differences between the other semantic roles, as virtually all roles except Agent are candidates for the ‘‘Invisible Agent’’ category. Still there is considerable difference between Emoter and Cognizer, for instance, although they are both roles associated with mental and not physical events. Thus no clear link between the level of visibility or dynamicity of the action expressed by the verb and the frequency of subject pronoun usage can be shown. Enrı´quez’s (1984) explanation that subject pronouns are used with verbs that express the speakers’ commitment or opinion and thus require individuation of the subject person is in line with the high pronoun frequency in Cognizer, but the theory fails to account for the differences found between the other categories. In sum, while the results of all previous studies point at the existence of a tendency to use subject pronouns frequently with ‘‘cognitive verbs’’, it remains unclear what other general tendencies exist and what are their motivations. 2.2.2. Pragmatic motivation to subject pronoun usage Davidson (1996), who studies the pragmatic functions of first and second person singular subject pronouns in spoken Madrid Spanish, argues that in a sentence-initial position these pronouns function similarly as detached NP topics and that their main function in conversation is to add ‘‘pragmatic weight’’ to the utterance: It is my contention that speakers are using SPs [= subject pronouns] to add ‘pragmatic weight’ to their utterance, a theoretical label which subsumes the notions of ‘emphasis’ that other authors have proposed, but which explains more 5 Van Valin (2001) defines semantic roles as generalizations of verb-specific micro-roles. The granularity of the role categories depends on the analysis the roles are used for. In general, a semantic analysis requires more fine-grained distinctions than a syntactic analysis, for which only a few very general roles (e.g. ‘‘Agent’’ and ‘‘Patient’’) might suffice.
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Table 5 Frequency of subject pronoun expression in different tenses and moods in Silva-Corvala´n (1997). Verb form
Frequency
N
Preterite Present Imperfect, conditional and subjunctive
27% 33% 36%
105/387 236/718 172/479 (Silva-Corvala´n, 1997:126)
fully how speakers use the SPs to disambiguate possible epistemic parentheticals, trigger speech act readings of certain verbs, and increase their ‘stake’ in whatever they are saying, either in an argument or in a statement of belief; it also serves to explain such meta-linguistic uses of the SP as signalling an attempt to either take or, in the case of utterance-final second person SPs, hand over the floor. (Davidson, 1996:551) An argument in favour of using such a broad notion is that a subject pronoun may be used for various functions at the same time, and it is often difficult or unnecessary to make a sharp distinction between the functions (Davidson, 1996:552). Davidson’s observation that subject pronouns are used to trigger speech act readings of some verbs or disambiguate epistemic parentheticals has to do with such frequently occurring verbs as creer ‘think, believe’ or saber ‘know’. While for example the forms creo ‘I think’ and no se´ ‘I don’t know’ are frequently used in speech as epistemic parentheticals with no truth-functional meaning (i.e. they do not refer to thinking or knowing anything in concrete), the same verb forms used with a subject pronoun are argued to have a more concrete meaning (Davidson, 1996:559). I shall return to this hypothesis in sections 4.1 and 4.7. Stewart (2000, 2003) adds another facet to the discussion of the pragmatic functions of Spanish subject pronouns, namely that of politeness. According to Stewart (2000), the use of subject pronouns with verbs of cognition can be considered as a way of marking the speaker’s opinions as their own and not necessarily shared by the addressee or others: expressions such as yo creo ‘I think’ thus serve as ‘‘hedges’’ in the sense of Brown and Levinson (1987). 3. Hypothesis and selection of data 3.1. Theoretical background and research hypothesis As the review of previous research in section 2 shows, there is clearly a connection between verb semantics and subject pronoun usage, but it is less clear what that connection actually is. The present study aims at testing whether a general principle of focusing of attention is able to account not only for the differences found between different moods and tenses, as suggested by Silva-Corvala´n (1997, 2001), but also for the differences in subject pronoun usage between different verbs or semantic roles. Silva-Corvala´n (1997, 2001) mentions the focusing of attention as an alternative explanation to the fact that subject pronoun usage is more frequent in the imperfect of indicative, conditional and subjunctive than in the present and especially the preterite of indicative. While the more frequent subject pronoun has been attributed to ambiguity avoidance, Silva-Corvala´n (1997:127) suggests that it is more plausible that the use of subject pronouns is less frequent e.g. in the preterite than in the imperfect because the preterite refers to actions that are presented as foregrounded and dynamic, while the imperfect presents the past action as stative and backgrounded. The use of subject pronouns in the imperfect would thus be a way to distract the attention from the action expressed by the verb by drawing the attention towards the subject and, consequently, away from the action, while in the preterite the omission of subject pronouns would permit focusing more attention to the action. This idea is supported by data from Mexican-American Spanish in Table 5. The three verbal categories distinguished by Silva-Corvala´n (1997) on the basis of their discourse function differ also in terms of transitivity. ‘‘Transitivity’’ is understood here in the sense defined by Hopper and Thompson (1980) as a scalar variable dependent on many features such as number of participants, aspect, volitionality of the Agent, and affectedness of the Patient. The preterite is used to express perfective aspect, which presents past action as concluded, and clauses with a verb in the preterite are thus generally more transitive than clauses with a verb in the imperfect. The imperfect tense pertains to the domain of the imperfective aspect that presents the action as non-concluded and thus lower in transitivity. The subjunctive and the conditional do not express imperfective or perfective aspect per se, but they can be considered to be generally lower in transitivity than the indicative.6 The present of indicative is not overtly aspectual as opposed to the past tenses of indicative, and does not encode high or low transitivity, which is compatible with the fact that in Silva-Corvala´n’s (1997) results the frequency of subject pronouns in the present tense is very close to the average frequency of pronominal presence (32%) in her corpus. Following Silva-Corvala´n’s (1997, 2001) suggestion, I propose that the focusing of attention on the subject, on the action expressed by the verb or on non-subject participants could also be relevant in explaining the differences attested in subject pronoun usage within different semantic roles and verb lexemes. The subject is generally taken to be the most prominent participant of the clause – the ‘‘primary figure’’ in Cognitive Grammar’s terms (Langacker, 1991:323). However, the relative prominence of the participants depends on the level of transitivity of the clause: for example, in a highly transitive clause (e.g. I killed the cat.) the object is thoroughly affected and thus might gain more prominence than in a less transitive clause
6 The use of both subjunctive and conditional is nevertheless relatively infrequent in the first person singular in oral discourse (cf. Posio, 2008) and thus unlikely to affect the results if only the first person singular is considered.
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Table 6 Verbs chosen for the analysis and the number of occurrences in CREA-O. Form
Meaning
Occurrences in 1SG
Occurrences in 2SG
creer dar decir entender estar hacer ir pensar poner querer sentir ser venir ver Total
‘believe, think’ ‘give’ ‘say’ ‘understand’ ‘be’ ‘make, do’ ‘go’ ‘think’ ‘put’ ‘want’ ‘feel, be sorry’ ‘be’ ‘come’ ‘see’
6636 230 3390 291 2752 513 2821 933 267 1843 305 1795 167 828 22,771
396 231 722 334 1235 411 1138 185 166 709 56a 934 103 774 7394
a The corpus contained only 56 occurrences of the verb sentir ‘feel, be sorry’ in 2nd person singular, which were all included in the sample. Although the smaller size of the sample and the impossibility of creating a random sample make the results less commensurate with those obtained from the other verbs, it was essential to include this verb as an example of a verb taking an Emoter subject.
(e.g. I saw the cat.). Hence one would expect not only that subject pronouns are used when the subject is prominent, but also that they be absent when other elements gain more prominence in the clause. A less prominent coding of the subject could be a way of giving more prominence to other participants or the action expressed by the verb. It could thus be hypothesized that in events coded by highly transitive clauses the attention of the speaker and the addressee is likely to be focused either on the action expressed by the verb or on the object argument, which is affected by the action, and hence subject pronoun usage would not be frequent in such clauses. In weakly transitive clauses the attention is more likely to be focused on the referent of the subject argument, as the action expressed by the verb is presented as non-concluded or backgrounded and is less likely to affect the object argument. Thus a higher frequency of subject pronouns would be expected in the less transitive clauses and a lower frequency in the more transitive clauses, where the action or the object are in the focus of attention. Note that ‘‘focus of attention’’ is here defined differently from what is understood by the term ‘‘focus’’ in such approaches as Centering theory (Grosz et al., 1995; Taboada, 2002) that considers focus from a textual perspective. Focus is defined at the clausal level as an attribute of the entity that is likely to be at the centre of attention in a particular clause. As my analysis is carried on at the clausal level, I do not consider the effects of previous or following foci to the selection of focus in a given clause. This is because I consider first and second person singular referents to be likely candidates for the focus position by virtue of their being present in the conversational situation. 3.2. Data selection The corpus chosen consists of the oral texts registered in Spain included in the Corpus de Referencia del Espan˜ol Actual (CREA; the selection used is henceforth referred to as CREA-O7). The CREA-O includes both informal conversational data from face-toface situations and TV and radio programs. Although different registers are included, a common denominator of the material is that it consists of unplanned and unedited oral texts. The selection of data can naturally be criticized for including material from a too wide range of different situations, thus not being really representative of any particular register or situation of language use. Unfortunately it is not possible to be very selective with the data because a relatively large corpus is needed in order to get a representative sample for each verb. In order to avoid the eventual effect of person syncretism and aspect, only occurrences of verbs in the present of indicative are studied. Comparisons of different oral genres and tenses will be left to further research. The verbs studied were selected among the most frequently occurring verbs in written and oral data (cf. Davies, 2006) avoiding highly polysemous verbs. The verbs chosen are listed in Table 6, showing the number of occurrences of each verb form in the corpus. As Table 6 shows, there are considerable differences in the frequencies of the different verbs in the first and second person singular (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984). The frequent use of the verbs estar ’be’ and ir ‘go’ in both persons is explained by their use as auxiliaries. Due to the egocentric nature of human interaction it is not surprising that the number of first person singular verb forms is three times higher than the number of second person singular verb forms. However, a great deal of this difference is caused by the effect of such verbs as creer ‘think, believe’8 and decir ‘say’. The verb form creo ‘I think’ is used almost 17 times more often than the verb form crees ‘you think’. The functions of these two forms in discourse are different: the first person
7 The oral subcorpus represents 10% of the data in the entire CREA corpus and contains approximately 9 million word forms from 1600 documents. These data come from Spain (50%) and other Spanish-speaking countries (50%). Only the data from Spain were used in this study. 8 The verb creer is used in the sense ‘believe’ with a prepositional object (e.g. Creo en ti. ‘I believe in you.’) while in the sense ‘think’ it is most often followed by a complement clause introduced by the complementizer que (e.g. Yo creo que. . . ‘I think that’): out of the 6636 occurrences of creo in CREA-O, 5103 are immediately followed by que.
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Table 7 Subject pronoun frequency in first person singular (of 100 occurrences).
pienso creo entiendo soy estoy hago veo quiero pongo digo vengo voy doy siento
‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I ‘I
think’ think, I believe’ understand’ am’ am’ make, I do’ see’ want’ put’ say’ come’ go’ give’ feel, I am sorry’
Frequency/100
Role
Focus
59 55 43 41 31 31 31 30 28 25 22 16 14 13
Cognizer Cognizer Cognizer S S Agent Perceptor Cognizer Volitioner Agent Dictionera S S Agent (ditransitive) Emoter
Subject Subject Subject Subject Complement Object Object Subject Object Object Object Action Subject Action Object Dative Object
a The label Dictioner is suggested for the subject of the verb decir ‘say’ instead of Agent, as the act of saying something is semantically different from more prototypical transitive actions including an Agent subject.
singular form is used to express the speaker’s subjective or epistemic stance towards a proposition while the second person singular form is not used to convey subjectivity (cf. Benveniste, 1966:263–264; Scheibman, 2001:65; Thompson, 2002). In a similar manner, the verb form digo ‘I say’ is typically not used to refer to a concrete act of the speaker saying something to someone but rather to mark the speaker’s stance (cf. section 4.8), while the verb form dices ‘you say’ is used to inquire what the addressee says about something (e.g. dices que. . .? ‘are you saying that. . .?’). Due to these different functions of some verbs, the first and second person singular should not be merged into one category (as in Enrı´quez, 1984). After selecting the verbs, I used the query filter provided with the CREA online corpus to select a sample of 150–200 occurrences of each verb. All the occurrences selected were analyzed manually and contexts where subject pronoun usage or omission was considered obligatory (cf. section 2.1) were discarded, as were the cases where the verb in question formed part of an idiom (e.g. the expression dar la vuelta ‘turn around’, literally ‘give the turn’ was not included in the sample of the verb dar ‘give’). Auxiliary uses of certain verbs (e.g. ir ‘go’, estar ‘be’) were also excluded. After this checking, the first one hundred occurrences were included in the final sample. This sampling method differs fundamentally from the previous studies, where the frequencies have been calculated on the basis of all occurrences of verbs in a given amount of text. Selecting the sample on a random basis from a bigger corpus permits the creation of equal-sized and commensurate samples on each verb independently of the frequency of the verb lexeme in the corpus. The sampling method also minimizes the effect that any single text of the corpus might have on the results. This is important because the frequency of subject pronouns can vary significantly between different texts (cf. Posio, 2008:38[10_TD$IF]–39) and might also be subject to a priming effect in texts or segments of texts (cf. Travis, 2007) not directly related to semantic factors. ?
4. Results and discussion The samples of one hundred occurrences per verb were analyzed manually for the subject pronoun frequencies. The results for first person singular are shown in Table 7; second person singular is discussed in section 4.9. The fourth column of the table (Role) contains the semantic role of the subject (defined and labelled according to the criteria of Posio, 2008; cf. section 2.2.1). The fifth column (Focus) lists those elements9 that are likely to be at the focus of attention in the clauses containing the verb given in the first column (cf. section 3.1). The Pearson’s Chi-square test applied to the frequencies presented in Table 7 shows that there is an extremely significant correlation between the verb lexeme and the frequency of subject pronouns in the samples (the expected frequency for all verbs is 31.36, x2 = 119.27, p < 0.001, N = 1400). However, a closer scrutiny of the Chi-square components and the relationship between the observed and expected frequencies (cf. Arppe, 2008:82) reveals that this result is mostly affected by the four verbs scoring the highest frequency (pienso, creo, entiendo, and soy) and the four verbs having the lowest frequency (vengo, voy, doy, and siento) that contribute to 98% of the Chi-square statistics of the whole table. The frequencies attested with the verbs situated between these two extremes (estoy, hago, veo, quiero, pongo, and digo) fall into a range too close to the expected frequency to show correlation between the verb lexeme and the frequency of subject pronouns. The common denominator of verbs associated with frequent use of subject pronouns (pienso, creo, entiendo, soy) seems to be their stativity: they include cognitive verbs and the verb ser ‘be’, while the verbs that are seldom used with a subject pronoun (vengo, voy, doy, siento) express more dynamic actions, with the exception of the verb sentir ‘feel, be sorry’. This resembles the results obtained by Enrı´quez (1984:244–245; cf. section 2.2.1). A parallelism can also be established between the connection of 9 I use the conventional grammatical labels of subject (defined as the argument that triggers person agreement on the verb) and object (defined as the second argument of two-argument verbs) instead of A, S and O, nevertheless reserving the term S to refer to the semantic role of the subject of one-argument verbs.
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subject pronoun usage to stativity vs. dynamicity and Silva-Corvala´n’s (1997:126) observation that subject pronoun usage is less frequent in the tenses and moods expressing dynamic and foregrounded action as opposed to stative and backgrounded action (cf. section 3.1). Although no clear-cut correlation seems to emerge between the level of transitivity and subject pronoun frequency in these three categories, a closer scrutiny of the samples reveals that some generalizations across the different verbs can be made in terms of their transitivity. These generalizations are discussed in sections 4.1[– ]FI$DT1_ 4.9, where examples of the verb samples are analyzed qualitatively in order to complement and interpret the quantitative results. 4.1. Verbs with Cognizer subjects: pensar, creer, and entender As Table 7 shows, in the first person singular those verbs that have a Cognizer subject and typically take complement clauses as their objects10 have clearly the highest frequencies of subject pronoun usage. With the verbs pensar ‘think’ and creer ‘believe, think’, it is actually more frequent to use the pronoun than to omit it (the frequency of pronoun expression being 59/100 and 55/100, respectively). The third verb on the list, entender ‘understand’ differs from the first two: while creer and pensar used in the first person of singular express the speaker’s stance towards the propositional content of the complement clause, entender refers only to the fact of understanding what is expressed in the complement clause. This is reflected by the lower frequency of subject pronouns with this verb (49/100) than with the other cognitive verbs. In Enrı´quez (1984) and Ferna´ndez Soriano (1999) it is assumed that the verbs that are used to express opinions are used in contrastive contexts more often than other verbs. However, clearly contrastive uses have been excluded from my sample, and it is difficult to interpret the subject pronouns examined here as primarily contrastive. Rather, it seems that the fragments yo creo que and yo pienso que ‘I think that’ are formulaic sequences, analyzable as ‘‘routinized expressions that personalize and organize the speaker’s contribution’’ (Scheibman, 2001:75), where the subject pronoun is present more often than not and does not indicate contrast or emphasis per se. The use of the verbs creer and pensar with a subject pronoun is exemplified in (5) and (6): (5)
Yo creo I
believe.1SG.PRES.IND
que
esto es
COMPL
this be.3SG.PRES.IND very interesting
muy interesante para charlar y PRE
talk
and
para discutir. PRE
discuss.INF
‘I think that this is very interesting to talk and discuss Es
decir, por un lado, yo creo
be.3SG.PRES.IND say.INF
one side I
PRE
believe.1SG.PRES.IND
que
Taciana sen˜alo´
COMPL
I mean, on the one hand, I think that Taciana signalled ?
e
enormemente, con mucho rigor, la diversidad, no?, de la situacio´n de las mujeres.
and enormously
PRE
much rigor
DET
diversity
NEG
PRE DET
situation
PRE DET
women
and enormously, very rigorously, the diversity in the situation of the women.’ CREA-O Coloquio tras conferencia, Madrid, 07/05/91 (6)
Estoy
co´mo soy.
encantado de enterarme
be.1SG.PRES.IND delighted
PRE
Pero yo pienso
find.out.INF:1SG.REFL how be.1SG.PRES.IND but I
think.1SG.PRES.IND
‘I am delighted to find out how I am. But I think que tu´
y
se´
that you and know.1SG.PRES.IND
he
leı´do,
no se´
AUX.1SG.PRES.IND
read.PART.PERF
NEG
si
know.1SG.PRES.IND if
that you and I know, I have read, I don’t know if es
verdad, que
be.3SG.PRES.IND truth
no te
COMPL NEG
vas
2SG.REFL go.2SG.PRES.IND
nunca ma´s.
a
casar
PRE
marry.INF never more
it is true that you are never going to marry again.’ CREA-O Hola Raffaella, 28/01/93, TVE 1 Verbs taking Cognizer subjects and complement clauses can be characterized as weakly transitive. They have only one referential argument (the subject), while the other argument (the complement clause) is a non-referential entity that cannot be affected in any ways by the action realized by the subject’s referent. In other words, there is only a cognitive relation between the arguments and no affectedness relation. Thompson (2002) argues against the traditional analysis of complement clauses as clausal arguments and their matrix sentences as transitive main clauses. She considers clauses such as I think (that) as 10
In Weber and Bentivoglio (1991), (92)% of the object arguments of the verbs pensar and creer were complement clauses.
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epistemic/evidential fragments that are used by the speaker to express her stance towards the proposition presented in the ‘‘complement clause’’, which is actually best analyzed as a non-subordinated independent clause.11 This analysis attributes an even lower transitivity level to the clauses with Cognizer subjects. Non-referential entities such as complement clauses are not semantically salient participants, if saliency is defined semantically as ‘‘focus upon the object’s12 being ‘visibly affected’’’ and pragmatically as ‘‘focus upon the object’s being an ‘important topic in the communication’’’ (Givo´n, 1984:171). The low saliency of one participant allows more attention to be paid to the other participant of the clause, in this case the Cognizer subject. In sentences with a first person singular Cognizer subject and a complement clause, the subject is conceptually a starting point (cf. Chafe, 1994) through which the contents of the complement clause can be accessed. Further indication of the low salience and non-object status of complement clauses is provided by Delbecque (2000) who observes that the cliticization of complement clauses is more restricted than that of object nominals. Although the verb creer in principle does permit the cliticizing of the complement clause, unlike some other verbs selecting for complement clauses (Delbecque, 2000:176), in my sample the verb creer occurs only twice with the object clitic lo and the verb pensar only once.13 In order to be cliticized, the object must be definite, familiar, and specific (cf. Delbecque, 2000:158) and as such it is also likely to be at the focus of attention, whereas a complement clause is not. Although the verbs creer and pensar most often occur with a subject pronoun, an interesting question is whether the presence of the pronoun affects the interpretation of the verb in some systematic way. Davidson (1996:559) argues that the function of the subject pronoun yo is to add pragmatic weight to an utterance (cf. section 2.2.2) and that the verb creer would acquire a more concrete, truth-functional meaning when used with the subject pronoun. Thus yo creo would more likely refer to believing something or thinking about something in concrete or, if given a speech act reading, it would mean more or less ‘I claim that’, while creo without the subject pronoun would be used as an epistemic parenthetical. Although Davidson’s (1996:558) example seems to support this interpretation, my data do not provide evidence in favour of such a generalization. There are no systematic differences in the contexts of occurrence of these verbs with and without subject pronouns and it is difficult to see how the presence of yo in examples like (5) would make the meaning of the verb more concrete and truth-functional. However, such an effect does seem to be found with the verb querer ‘want’ (cf. section 4.7[12_TD$IF]). 4.2. One-argument verbs ser, estar, ir, and venir After the verbs with a Cognizer subject, the next highest frequencies are found in the one-argument verbs ser and estar. The verb ser is used as a copula with complements that express properties or qualities inherent in the subject’s referent and with the preposition de to express the origin or material of the referent, estar is used to express location (both concrete and metaphoric, e.g. temporal) or as a copula with adjective complements that express states or changes of state that are not inherent in the referent of the subject. It is thus not surprising that subject pronouns are used more often with the verb ser, as in clauses containing this verb the attention is more likely to be focused to the subject argument than to the complement. This is especially noticeable in examples like (7) and (8), where the verb ser is used to characterize the speaker: (7)
Bueno, de entrada PART
PRE
yo soy
entrance I
ası´,
siempre he
be.1SG.PRES.IND like.this always
tenido
AUX.1SG.PRES.IND
este aspecto,
have.PART.PERF this look
‘Well, to begin with I am like this, I have always have had this look, no me NEG
considero
1SG.REFL consider.1SG.PRES.IND
ni
guapo,
ni
feo, ni
nada.
NEG
handsome
NEG
ugly
nothing
NEG
I don’t consider myself handsome or ugly or anything.’ CREA-O Un dı´a es un dı´a, 20/09/90, TVE 1 (8)
Entonces yo le then
I
dije:
pero digo
yo soy
3SG.DAT say.1SG.PRET.IND but say.1SG.PRES.IND I
cato´lica y
be.1SG.PRES.IND catholic and
‘Then I said to him: but I say I am catholic and no puedo NEG
coger
can.1SG.PRES.IND take.INF
un marido DET
musulma´n.
husband muslim
I can not take a Muslim husband.’ CREA-O Un dı´a es un dı´a, 20/09/90, TVE 1
11
Cf. also Benveniste (1966:264) who expresses the same idea using slightly different concepts. The term ‘‘object’’ does not refer to the grammatical object of a clause but is rather used as a synonym of ‘‘entity’’. 13 With the verb pensar, it is actually more usual to refer to the complement clause by the adverb ası´ ‘like that’. The clauses lo pienso and pienso ası´ also differ in meaning: the first could be rendered into English as ‘I am thinking about it’ and the latter ‘I think so’. 12
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In clauses where the verb estar is used, the attention is more likely to be focused on the complement, as it refers to a state that is not inherent in the referent of the subject argument, such as the adjective seguro ‘sure’ in example (9). Example (10) illustrates the tendency to use the subject pronoun more frequently with the verb ser and less frequently with the verb estar, which is here used in the sense of ‘accompanying someone’. In this example, both verbs ser and estar are repeated, but this repetition has no effect on the subject pronoun usage: ser is used with a pronoun and estar without a pronoun: (9)
Aunque hace
rato
que no le
although make.3SG.PRES.IND moment that
NEG
escuchamos,
estoy
seguro
3SG.DAT hear.1PL.PRES.IND be.1SG.PRES.IND sure
Although we haven’t heard from him for some time, I am sure que permanece
en lı´nea desde El Cairo, Antonio Alonso.
that stay.3SG.PRES.IND
PRE
line from
that he stays on line from Cairo, Antonio Alonso.’ CREA-O Las cosas como son en el Mundo, 05/02/91, Madrid, RNE (10)
Hombre, ahı´
de las que este´n
yo no yo no soy
there I
PART
NEG
I
NEG
be.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE DET
todo el dı´a
that be.3PL.PRES.SUBJ all
DET
day
‘Well, I am not one of those women who are all day ahı´
estoy
contigo. Yo no soy
there be.1SG.PRES.IND with.you I
de esas que estoy
be.1SG.PRES.IND
NEG
PRE
todo el
those that 1SG.PRES.IND all
DET
dı´a [. . .] day
there I am with you. I am not one of those women that are all day. . .’ CREA-O Conversacio´n 6, Universidad de Alcala´ de Henares However, the difference between ser and estar is not abrupt, the subject pronoun frequency being 41/100 in ser and 31/100 in estar. A greater difference is found between these two verbs and the verbs ir ‘go’, where the frequency is only 16/100, and venir ‘come’, with a frequency of 22/100. The verbs ir and venir express more dynamic and salient action than the stative verbs ser and estar. They also favour the focusing of attention on the goal of the motion or on the starting point, as in example (11), where no subject pronoun is used: ?
(11)
visto
AUX.2SG.PRES.IND
see.PART.PERF this morning
Has
esta man˜ana el
atasco
DET
Extremadura que
traffic.jam
COMPL
vengo come.1SG.PRES.IND
‘Have you seen this morning the traffic jam [in] Extremadura, as I come ?
de Mo´stoles, con la huelga de los trenes, no? PRE
with
DET
strike
PRE DET
trains
NEG
from Mo´stoles, with the railway strike?’ ˜ eros de trabajo, Madrid, 20/05/91 CREA-O Juzgado, conversacio´n entre compan The verb ir ‘go’ can express motion towards any point different from the speaker’s location, in which case the attention is focused on the goal of the motion and not on the speaker. The example (12) illustrates the use of the verb ir without a subject pronoun: ?
(12)
Que´ sueles
hacer en el tiempo libre? Pues voy
what use.to.1SG.PRES.IND do.INF
PRE DET
time
free
PART
go.1SG.PRES.IND
al
cine,
PRE.DET
cinema
‘What do you use to do in your free time? Well, I go to the movies veo
alguna pelı´cula en el vı´deo, leo
see.1SG.PRES.IND some film
PRE DET
video read.1SG.PRES.IND much
watch some film on the video, I read a lot, and go out con los amigos. with
DET
mucho, eso, y
friends
with my friends.’ CREA-O Grupo G 11, Geografı´a e Historia
salir
this and go.out.INF
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Hopper and Thompson (1980:254) discuss only briefly the transitivity of one-argument verbs. As in their view the number of arguments is only one component of transitivity, it is justified to consider verbs referring to telic, punctual and volitional actions (e.g. ‘going somewhere’) as more transitive than verbs expressing atelic, non-punctual and non-volitional states (e.g. ‘being something’). Both stativity and dynamicity can be considered components of transitivity.14 The more dynamic verbs ir and venir thus encode events that are higher in transitivity than the events encoded by the more stative verbs ser and estar, as the verbs ir and venir typically express salient, observable and punctual action compared to the more stative verbs ser and estar. As is the case with verbs with Cognizer subjects, lower transitivity thus seems to favour subject pronoun usage. 4.3. The three-argument verb with Agent subjects: dar The verb dar ‘give’ has a relatively low subject pronoun frequency (14/100). It is a three-argument verb capable of taking a subject, an object and a dative argument. The use of dar is illustrated by example (13), where both a pronominal direct object and a pronominal indirect object are present: Yo es I
be.3SG.PRES.IND
aquı´ una coleccio´n.
que
tengo
COMPL
have.1SG.PRES.IND here
DET
!
(13)
Pero era be.3SG.IMP.IND
collection but
‘I have here a collection. But I had to da´rsela
pero es
que si se
la
doy
give.INF:3SG.DAT:3SG.ACC but be.1SG.PRES.IND that if 3SG.DAT 3SG.ACC give.1SG.PRES.IND give it to him, but it is that if I give it to him me
quedo
sin
nada!
1SG.REFL stay.1SG.PRES.IND without nothing I’ll have nothing left for me.’ CREA-O Empresa, conversaciones telefo´nicas, Madrid, 18/03/91 The pronominal arguments are obligatorily placed in the preverbal position and thus compete for that place with the subject pronoun, but unlike the subject, the object and dative arguments cannot be omitted. In example (14), there is a topicalized negative adverbial phrase ahora tampoco ‘not now, either’ that takes the preverbal position. The example comes from a situation where a teacher is trying to make a group of pupils calm down in order to give them their grades: (14)
Pero si no os calla´is but if
NEG
ahora tampoco os
2PL shut.up.2PL.PRES.IND now
NEG
las
doy,
ahora,
2PL.DAT 3PL.ACC give.1SG.PRES.IND now
‘But if you don’t shut up, I won’t give you them now either, now, no se NEG
3SG.REFL
ha
terminado
la clase.
AUX.3SG.PRES.IND
end.PART.PERF
DET
class
the class hasn’t ended.’ ˜ anza, clase de Bachillerato, Madrid, 18/12/91 B CREA-O Centro de ensen It is possible that in both (13) and (14) the presence of other elements in the preverbal position reduces the probability of a preverbal subject pronoun, and placing the subject after the verb would trigger an unwanted contrastive interpretation. In this example the use of a subject pronoun would also be pragmatically unmotivated, as speaker is probably aiming at highlighting the negative adverbial phrase ahora tampoco and not his own person. As mentioned at the end of section 4.1, the fact that the object and the dative arguments can be cliticized in (13) and (14) can be seen as an indication of their being at the focus of attention. Although the basic meaning of the verb dar refers to the three-participant event where ‘somebody gives something to someone’, this is clearly not the most common use of the verb in my data. While idiomatic expressions that make use of this verb were not included in the sample, it is often difficult to draw the line between metaphorical and concrete uses of the verb in the case of such expressions as examples (15) and (16). Although ‘give the phone number’ in (15) might refer to a more concrete event than ‘give one’s opinion’ in (16) such as passing a piece of paper to someone, in their context both expressions refer to the event of saying something to the addressee:
14 Even though Hopper and Thompson (1980:252) do not include the stative vs. dynamic distinction in their original list of transitivity components, it is closely related to such notions as kinesis (action vs. non-action), aspect (telic vs. atelic) and punctuality (punctual vs. non-punctual).
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(15)
Si quieres,
te
el tele´fono
doy
if want.2G.PRES.IND 2SG.DAT give.1SG.PRES.IND
DET
telephone
789
de Antonio. PRE
‘If you want, I give you Antonio’s phone number.’ CREA-O Conversacio´n telefo´nica, Madrid, 04/12/91 B (16)
Entonces, yo le then
I
doy
3SG.DAT give.1SG.PRES.IND
mi opinio´n.
a
usted
PRE
2.SG.HON my opinion
‘Then I give you my opinio´n.’ CREA-O La Luna, 21/11/89, TVE 1 As a matter of fact, the majority of the examples in the sample on dar are more-or-less metaphoric instances of ‘giving’ such as dar pistas ‘give clues’, dar un beso ‘give a kiss’, dar su opinio´n ‘give ones opinion’, dar clases ‘give classes’, dar publicidad ‘make publicity’ dar entrevistas ‘give interviews’, etc. Only 33 of the 100 examples refer to a concrete act of giving something to someone. Such concrete giving events are high in transitivity and low in subject pronoun frequency, as the presence of two other participants and the fact that the verb expresses salient action decreases the likelihood of focusing attention to the subject. Although most of the metaphorical uses of the verb dar are less transitive, they have the same three-participant structure. As dar is semantically a low-content verb, the object and dative arguments are also crucial to the meaning of the clause and therefore likely to be at the focus of attention and, consequently, to be cliticized. 4.4. Two-argument verbs with Emoter subjects: sentir, amar, temer, and disfrutar The verb verb sentir ‘feel, be sorry’ has a subject pronoun frequency of 13/100. Emoter subjects thus seem to be associated with a low frequency of subject pronouns despite occurring in events that are low in transitivity (cf. also Posio, 2008, in press). The encoding of Emoters as subjects is rare in general: they are usually encoded as dative arguments, while the stimulus of emotion is encoded as the subject. In the relatively rare case that Emoters become subjects, they are typically not salient enough to trigger subject pronoun usage. Emoters are atypical subjects in that they are affected (rather than affecting) participants that do not instigate volitional actions (cf. Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 2005:23). However, Emoters are subject-like both syntactically, as they typically occupy the same preverbal position as subjects even if they are encoded as datives, and semantically, because their referents are usually animate, human and definite. The low subject pronoun frequency associated with Emoters indicates that in events involving an Emoter subject the attention is focused more on the source of the emotion, even in the case that the experiencer of the emotion becomes the subject of the clause. An example of the verb sentir is given in (17): (17)
Eso nos
pasa
that 1PL.DAT happen.3SG.PRES.IND
a
todos. Pero siento
PRE
all
but feel.1SG.PRES.IND
sobre todo, PRE
everything
‘That happens to all of us. But I feel, above all siento
un gran respeto por las personas que lo
feel.1SG.PRES.IND
DET
big respect
PRE DET
son
persons that 3SG.ACC be.3PL.PRES.IND
I feel great respect to the people that are that y
lo
dicen [. . .]
and 3SG.ACC say.3PL.PRES.IND and who say it . . .’ CREA-O Grupo G 1, Filologı´a Hispa´nica In order to check whether the low frequency of subject pronoun usage is a property of verbs that take Emoter subjects in general and not just of the verb sentir, I examined another sample of verbs with Emoter subjects. The results, given in Table 8, indicate that the use of subject pronouns is relatively rare with the verbs of this category, independently of whether their objects are clausal complements or nominals. Table 8 Subject pronoun frequency with verbs taking Emoter subjects.
amo temo disfruto Total
‘I love’ ‘I fear’ ‘I enjoy’
Frequency
Role
Focus
9/34 8/52 1/16 18/102 (=18%)
Emoter Emoter Emoter
Object Object Object
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790
As can be seen by examining Tables 6 and 8, verbs taking Emoter subjects are relatively rare in the corpus. Their rarity is probably the reason why they have not been analyzed separately in previous studies on the influence of verb semantics and subject pronoun usage, but rather included into other more general categories. 4.5. Two-argument verbs with Agent subjects: hacer and poner The verbs hacer ‘do’ (31/100) and poner ‘put’ (28/100) are the verbs closest to prototypical transitive verbs in the data, as their subjects typically are Agents. The realization of this semantic role involves another participant, the object argument, which is affected by the action instigated by the referent of the subject argument. Note that with the verbs hacer and poner the object arguments cannot be omitted (e.g. Hago la cena.’I make the dinner.’ *Hago. *‘I make’). The verb poner also involves a third participant expressing location (cf. Pongo el libro en la mesa. ‘I put the book to the table.’ *Pongo el libro. *‘I put the book.’). The verbs hacer and poner thus differ syntactically from verbs with Cognizer subjects that can be used without an object argument (e.g. No creo. ‘I don’t think so’, Entiendo. ‘I understand’). This difference is semantically motivated: verbs like hacer, poner, and dar are low-content verbs that only acquire a full meaning when used with an object argument. In example (18), a subject pronoun is used with the verb form soy ‘I am’ but not with the verb hago ‘I make’: (18)
Claro, yo soy
feliz
ahora haciendo sopas, si son
para seis,
be.1SG.PRES.IND happy now make.GER soups if be.3PL.PRES.IND
clear I
PRE
six
‘Of course, I am happy making soups if they are for six, si son if
para siete, si son
BE.3PL.PRES.IND PRE
para ocho. Y
seven if be.3PL.PRES.IND
PRE
hago
eight and make.1SG.PRES.IND
la
cena.
DET
dinner
if they are for seven, if they are for eight. And I make the dinner.’ CREA-O Domicilio particular, conversacio´n familiar, Segovia, 1991 In example (19), no subject pronoun is used with the verb form hago ‘I make’, as the attention is focused on the object argument fotos ‘photos’, which is topical enough to be cliticized in the next clause: (19)
Yo no
me
I
1SG.REFL dedicate.1SG.PRES.IND
NEG
dedico
a
esto, esto a
mı´
PRE
this this
1SG.OBL
PRE
‘I don’t do this for a living, I me
gusta
me
gusta.
1SG.DAT please.3SG.PRES.IND 1SG.DAT please.3SG.PRES.IND like this, I like this. Hago
fotos
y
se
las
ensen˜o
a
make.1SG.PRES.IND photos and 3PL.DAT 3PL.ACC show.1SG.PRES.IND
la gente.
PRE DET
people
I take photos and show them to people.’ ˜ada de proyeccio´n de diapositivas, dirigida a un grupo de ancianos para CREA-O Charla, acompan conmemorar el. . . Example (20) includes three clauses that can be considered of relatively high transitivity because despite of being formally in the present tense they refer to concluded past actions15 that affect the object argument of the clause. Again, no subject pronouns are used, as the attention is focused on the object argument (whose referent is a concrete, affected entity) and on the action (which is factual and concluded), not on the subject: (20)
Entonces a then
la noche en el Chad, esto, voy
PRE DET
night
PRE DET
Chad this go.1SG.PRES.IND
a
cerrar
PRE
close.INF
‘Then at night in Chad I go to close la puerta de mi habitacio´n y DET
door
PRE
my room
and
no tenı´a NEG
have.3/1SG.IMP.IND
ni llave ni NEG
key
NEG
nada, nothing
the door of my room and it/I didn’t even have a key or anything,
15
The interpretation is based on the discourse context and on the presence of two verbs in the imperfect of indicative.
P. Posio / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 777–798
muy pobre todo,
la u´nica silla
entonces cojo grab.1SG.PRES.IND
very poor everything then
791
DET
only chair
everything [was] very poor, then I take the only chair que habı´a that
y
AUX.3SG.IMP.IND
la
detra´s del
pongo
and 3SG.ACC put.1SG.PRES.IND behind
picaporte.
PRE.DET
door.handle
that there was and I put it behind the door handle.’ CREA-O Un dı´a es un dı´a, 20/09/90, TVE 1
4.6. The two-argument verb with Perceptor–Cognizer subjects: ver The verb ver ‘see’ is used in the sample in at least three different meanings. While the verb is considered primarily a perception verb whose subject argument is a Perceptor, another and clearly more common reading for the verb in the sample is one that involves a cognitive process realized by the referent of the subject (sometimes referred to as ‘‘indirect perception’’). In the latter use, the semantic role of the subject is Cognizer rather than Perceptor. While the overall frequency of subject pronouns with ver is 31/100, the two uses of the verb actually show a different pattern of subject pronoun usage: subject pronouns are used more often when the verb has a cognitive reading. Example (21) shows the verb used in a cognitive sense, not referring to the act of perceiving something visually but rather to the way the speakers understand the topic:
Tu´ tienes
?
(21)
alumnos que hagan
you have.2SG.PRES.IND pupils
that make.3PL.PRES.SUBJ
el
tercero,
DET
third
‘Do you have pupils that are in third grade te
encuentras
por ahı´?
2SG.REFL find.2SG.PRES.IND
PRE
there
are you about there?’
Segundo, sı´. second
yes
‘Second grade, yes.’ Tu´ ves
?
que
tienen
el mismo a´nimo? O sea,
you see.2SG.PRES.IND
COMPL
have 3PL.PRES.IND
DET
same spirit
or be.3SG.PRES.SUBJ
que COMPL
‘Do you see that they have the same spirit? I mean, that tienen
las mismas perspectivas. Porque
have.3PL
DET
same
yo lo que veo es
perspectives because I
DET
that see be.3SG.PRES.IND
they have the same perspectives. Because what I see is que
esta´n
COMPL
be.3PL.PRES.IND more unmotivated that
ma´s
desmotivados que.
that they are less motivated than. . .’
Yo veo que
van
I
go.3PL.PRES.IND equal that go.1SG.IMP.IND I
see
COMPL
igual que iba
yo en sus PRE
an˜os.
their years
‘I see that they are acting the same as I did in their age.’ ˜ os, fragmentos no transcritos en el Corpus para el CREA-O Entrevista CSC003, hombre, 22 an ˜. . . estudio del espan In the majority of the examples of ver, the verb is used with such a cognitive reading as in example (21). In those cases where the verb refers to a perception event, the object argument (‘‘what is seen’’) is at the focus of attention of the clause, which decreases the likelihood of subject pronoun usage in these clauses. This is illustrated by the examples (22) and (23)16: 16 An alternative explanation to the absence of subject pronoun in (22) and (23) is that these are sentences with various coreferential subjects. However, coreferential first person singular subjects need not be null.
792
(22)
P. Posio / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 777–798
Entonces he
encontrado esa paz,
AUX.1SG.PRES.IND
then
estoy
aquı´, estoy
trabajando,
find.PART.PERF this peace be.1SG.PRES.IND here be.1SG.PRES.IND work.GER
‘Then I have found this peace, I’m here, I’m working, estoy
al
pu´blico, oigo
al
pu´blico,
PRE.DET
public hear.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE.DET
public
cantando, veo
be.1SG.PRES.IND sing.GER
see.1SG.PRES.IND
I’m singing, I see the public, I hear the public, veo
las crı´ticas.
see.1SG.PRES.IND
DET
critics
I see the critics.’ CREA-O El peor programa de la semana, 08/12/93, TVE 1 (23)
Me
voy
1SG.REFL go.1SG.PRES.IND
a
emocionar
un poco, porque la
PRE
touch.emotionally.INF
DET
veo
little because 3SG.ACC see.1SG.PRES.IND
‘I’m going to go a little emotional, because I see you a usted PRE
y
me
da
pena que
you.POLITE and 1SG.DAT give.3SG.PRES.IND pity
en este momento no este´
COMPL PRE
this moment
NEG
be.3SG.PRES.SUBJ
and I pity that in this momento mi abuela
A´ngela tambie´n aquı´.
my grandmother
here
my granny Angela isn’t here too.’ !
CREA-O Ay! vida mı´a, 10/06/93, TVE 1 Note that in the cognitive interpretation (cf. example 21), ver selects for clausal complements introduced by que, while in the most prototypical sense of visual perception (cf. examples 22–23) the objects are nominals referring to physical entities. However, the object of visual perception can also be an event encoded by a complement clause (e.g. veo que esta´ lloviendo ‘I see that it is raining’). In such cases it is difficult to distinguish between the perceptive and the cognitive reading and such a difference might be illusory, as ‘‘seeing typically involves categorizing’’ (Lakoff, 1987:127), i.e. the sensory process of seeing something automatically leads to the cognitive process of categorizing the seen object or event. A third reading found for the verb ver in my sample is the sense of ‘seeing/meeting someone’ as in the example (24). It seems that the subject pronoun is most often not used when the verb is used in this sense, but the small the number of examples does not permit to draw any general conclusions. Note that in (25) the object a tu hermana ‘your sister’ is topicalized by a cleft construction, focusing more attention on it than the subject: (24)
A
la que hace
PRE DET
mucho que no veo
who make. 3SG.PRES.IND.ind much that
a
tu
PRE
your sister
NEG
es
see.1SG.PRES.IND be.3SG.PRES.IND
hermana, joder. INTERJECTION
‘Your sister is the one I haven’t seen for a long time.’ CREA-O Conversacio´n 16, Universidad de Alcala´ de Henares
4.7. The two-argument verb with Volitioner subjects: querer The verb querer ‘want’ does not differ from the agentive verbs in terms of its subject pronoun frequency (30/100), which is close to the frequency of 28.17% found by Enrı´quez (1984: 244–245) for volitional verbs. Verbs expressing volition might be likely candidates for a more frequent subject pronoun usage, as volition is a highly interior or subjective activity (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Miyajima, 2000), and verbs expressing volition can take non-referential object arguments such as complement clauses that are not salient participants. However, the frequency of subject pronouns with the verb querer is relatively low. This might be due to the fact that the overt expression of desiring something is a possibly face-threatening act which may cause speakers to avoid excessively salient reference to themselves (Brown and Levinson, 1987:190[15_TD$IF]–198). In addition, many instances of the verb form quiero ‘I want’ used without a subject pronoun in the sample are metatextual expressions where
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793
the verb querer modifies a speech act verb[16_TD$IF].17 [17_TD$IF] Such expressions are stylistically confined to a relatively formal register, as in example (25) that comes from a television debate: (25)
Porque quiero
adema´s que
indicar
because want.1SG.PRES.IND indicate.INF besides
me
COMPL
parece
muy poco
1SG.DAT seem.3SG.PRES.IND very little
‘Because I want to indicate also that I think it is not no voy NEG
a decir correcto, muy poco justo estar acusando
go.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE
say.INF correct very little fair
be.INF accuse.GER
I won’t say correct but very unfair to be accusing conmigo [. . .]
a unos directivos que estaban PRE DET
directives that be.3PL.IMP.IND with.me
some executives that were with me. . .’ CREA-O Televisio´n, 08/04/91, Telemadrid In more concrete uses of the verb form quiero ‘I want’, the use of subject pronouns is more frequent, as in examples (26) and (27) from more informal contexts than example (25). This indicates that the use of subject pronouns might be conditioned by the formality of the register or situation and the concomitant politeness requirements. Example (26) comes from a telephone conversation where the speakers discuss how many tickets they should get for a spectacle: (26)
enterare´
Me
y
si es
ası´,
1SG.REFL find.out.1SG.FUT.IND and if be.3SG.PRES.IND like.this
pues. PART
‘I’ll find out and if it’s like that, then yo pensaba
el sa´bado
ir
think.1SG.IMP.IND go.INF
I
DET
Saturday
I had thought to go there on Saturday.’
Sı´. Pues. yes
PART
‘Yeah.’
Que
yo quiero
COMPL
I
entrada, Alfonso tambie´n.
want.1SG.PRES.IND ticket
‘So I want a ticket and Alfonso, too.’ CREA-O Conversacio´n telefo´nica, Madrid, 04/12/91 B Example (27) comes from a conversation in a bar (although it is not indicated in the transcription, the speakers are probably talking to the waiter): (27)
Yo quiero I
want.1SG.PRES.IND
un mosto. DET
grape.juice
‘I want a grape juice.’
Yo quiero I
want.1SG.PRES.IND
una cerveza. DET
beer
‘I want a beer.’ CREA-O Local pu´blico, conversacio´n entre amigos, Madrid, 07/11/91 To sum up, in its concrete sense the verb querer appears frequently with a subject pronoun, while the pronoun is omitted in abstract and more-or-less conventionalized uses. This is in line with Davidson’s (1996) observation on subject pronoun use with the verbs saber ‘know’ and creer ‘think, believe’. While the verb saber is often used in epistemic parentheticals without a subject pronoun (e.g. the frequent epistemic downtowner no se´ ‘I don’t know, dunno’), the use of the subject pronoun can be 17 The verb querer was not interpreted as an auxiliary in this study, as it does not simply modify the meaning of the verb in infinitive unlike the auxiliaries estar (e.g. estoy indicando ‘I am indicating I indicate’) and ir (e.g. voy a indicar ‘I will indicate I indicate’; cf. quiero indicar ‘I want to indicate’ *‘I indicate’).
794
P. Posio / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 777–798
interpreted as an indication of ‘‘a less grammaticalized (or abstract) reading of a verb which has through usage acquired several potential interpretations’’ (Davidson, 1996:559). 4.8. The two-argument verb with Dictioner subjects: decir The verb decir ‘say’ has a frequency of subject pronoun usage of 25/100. It resembles the cognitive verbs creer and pensar in that it is used to indicate that what is being said in the complement clause is an opinion expressed by the speaker. Unlike creer and pensar, decir focuses the attention on the proposition contained in its complement clause by referring to the explicit act of uttering the clause, and it would not make sense to distract attention to the subject’s referent by using a subject pronoun. Thus consider example (28): (28)
El proble el problema es DET
probl-
DET
problem be.3SG.PRES.IND
que
eso sı´
que
hace
COMPL
that yes
COMPL
make.3SG.PRES.IND
‘The problem is that it is going to make inoperativa la reunio´n. Por eso te inoperative
meeting
DET
digo
que
that 2SG.DAT say.1SG.PRES.IND
PRE
COMPL
the meeting inoperative. hay
que
mirarse
AUX.3SG.PRES.IND COMPL
primero el proyecto.
look.INF.REFL.3SG first
DET
project
This is why I say to you that one has to look first at the project.’ CREA-O Conversacio´n entre militantes de un partido polı´tico, Madrid, 21/05/91 In example (28), the function of the fragment te digo que ‘I say that’ is to draw the attention of the addressee to what is being said and the reason why it is being said, not to inform him of the mere fact that the speaker is saying something to him or that it is the speaker who is saying something. Another use of the verb form digo ‘I say’ is to correct an eventual false interpretation of what the speaker has said or is about to say. This is illustrated by example (29): (29)
Ha
sido
sı´, es
era
era
bueno,
AUX.3SG.PRES.IND
be.PART.PERF yes be.3SG.PRES.IND be.3SG.IMP.IND be.3SG.IND.IMP good
‘It has been like this, it was good, but I don’t say that no, no digo NEG NEG
inevitable, pero yo tenı´a
que fuera
say.1SG.PRES.IND that be.3SG.IMP.SUBJ inevitable but I
have.1SG.IMP.IND
it would have been inevitable, but I had bastantes esperanzas en el programa [. . .] many
hopes
PRE DET
program
lots of hope on the program. . .. CREA-O A vivir que son dos dı´as, 02/11/96, Cadena SER The verb form digo appears also with a subject pronoun in the contrastive postverbal position in the expression digo yo, which is used to attenuate a proposition by marking it overtly as an opinion expressed by the speaker, not necessarily shared by the addressee (cf. Stewart, 2000). Thus consider example (30), where digo yo is combined with another discourse marker vamos that also signals reorientation in discourse: [. . .] no tenemos NEG
reloj,
pero, media hora ma´s media hora menos,
have.1PL.PRES.IND watch but
half
hour more half
‘. . . we don’t have a watch, but, half an hour less or more, sera´n
sobre las diez, vamos digo
be.3PL.FUT.IND
PRE
DET
10
PART
yo, no?
say.1SG.PRES.IND I
It’s about ten o’clock, well, isn’t it?’ CREA-O Tariro, tariro, 13/12/88, TVE 1
?
(30)
NEG
hour less
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795
Table 9 Subject pronoun frequency in second person singular (of 100 occurrences).
crees eres piensas dices esta´s ves pones vas haces quieres vienes das entiendes sientes a
‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you ‘you
believe, you think’ are’ think’ say’ are’ see’ put’ go’ make, you do’ want’ come’ give’ understand’ feel, you are sorry’
Frequency/100
Role
Focus
58 36 34 29 24 20 19 14 14 12 11 9 8 1/56a
Cognizer S Cognizer Dictioner S Perceptor Cognizer Agent S Agent Volitioner S Agent Cognizer Emoter
Subject Subject Subject Object Complement Object. Subject Object Action Object Object Action Subject Object Recipient Subject Object
In the 56 clauses found in the corpus and included in the sample, the verb co-occurred with a subject pronoun only once.[21_TD$IF]
The use of the verb form digo is very common in oral discourse (cf. Table 1), but it is mainly used for purposes illustrated in examples (28) to (30), while the propositional use of digo to refer to an actual event of saying something is rare. Such fragments as por eso te digo que, no digo que, and digo yo are recognizable formulaic expressions and the use of subject pronouns is clearly connected to the functions that these fragments have in oral discourse. In many cases the verb form digo is best analyzed as a discourse particle or a formulaic construction (cf. 30) where the presence or absence of the subject pronoun has grammaticalized to a high degree. 4.9. Differences between first and second person singular The second person singular presents some interesting differences in subject pronoun usage with regard to the first person singular (cf. Table 9). The overall frequency of subject pronouns is lower than in the first person, except for the verb creer which is the only verb that has a higher frequency in the second person. The fact that subject pronoun usage is generally most frequent in the first person singular can be attributed to the egocentric nature of discourse. One could also argue that constant use of subject pronouns to refer to the addressee is felt to be too intimidating and that the use of less prominent expressions is a form of negative politeness (as defined in Brown and Levinson, 1987; cf. also Stewart, 2003). As for the first person singular, the Pearson’s Chi-square test applied to the results in Table 9 shows that there is an extremely significant correlation between the verb lexeme and subject pronoun frequency also in the second person singular (the expected frequency for all verbs is 20.71, x2 = 170.05, p < 0.001, N = 1400). This result is mostly due to the four verbs scoring the highest frequencies (crees, eres, piensas, and dices) and the five verbs with the lowest frequencies (quieres, vienes, das, entiendes, and sientes), making up 96% of the Chi-square statistics of the whole table. The subject pronoun frequency with the verbs esta´s, ves, pones, vas, and haces falls into a range too close to the expected frequency to show a correlation between the verb lexeme and the frequency of subject pronouns. The form crees ‘you think/believe’ differs radically from all the other verbs and contributes alone to 50% of the Chi-square statistics of the whole table. The frequent use of the second person singular subject pronoun tu´ with the verb creer ‘think, believe’ is a lexical characteristic of this verb and not of all the verbs with Cognizer subjects, as the verbs pensar ‘think’ and entender ‘understand’ have considerably lower subject pronoun frequencies. While the ranking of the verbs is relatively similar in the first and second person singular, two verbs manifest a different pattern, namely entender ‘understand’ and querer ‘want’ Both have a relatively higher frequency in the first person singular (43/100 and 30/100, respectively) and a lower frequency in the second person singular (8/100 and 12/100, respectively). This is probably due to the fact that in the second person singular these verbs are used mainly in questions, where attention is not focused on the referent of the subject but rather on the polarity or on the object argument. When the subject pronoun is used with the forms entiendes and quieres, it is typically in contexts where personal involvement of the addressee is at stake (cf. Davidson, 1996), as in examples (31) and (32): Jama´s he never
AUX.1SG.PRES.IND
insultado
a nadie.
insult.PART.PERF
PRE
[. . .] Es
nobody
‘I have never insulted anybody. [. . .] It’s a. . . who. . . ?
que´ entiendes
tu´
what understand.2SG.PRES.IND you
por insultar? PRE
insult.INF
what do you understand by insulting?’ CREA-O El martes que viene, 30/01/90, TVE 1
be.3SG.PRES.IND
un
?
(31)
DET
who
quie´n
796
?
(32)
P. Posio / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 777–798
Que´ quieres
ser
tu´,
Joselito? Yo, el mejor.
what want.2SG.PRES.IND be.INF you
DET
best
‘What do you want to be, [little] Jose´? I [want to be] the best.’ CREA-O El martes que viene, 26/02/90, TVE 1 Finally, it has to be recalled that in Spanish the second person singular is used also for generic reference. In some studies it has been pointed out that the frequency of subject pronoun expression is either lower (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984; Cameron, 1993, for Spanish spoken in Madrid) or higher (cf. Cameron, 1993, for Puerto Rican Spanish) in the generic use than in the referential use, naturally depending on the dialect. However, I will not touch the issue here as the identifying the generic uses of the second person singular in my data is quite problematic. 4.10. Summary of the factors affecting subject pronoun usage This section summarizes briefly the factors affecting subject pronoun usage examined in [18_TD$IF]sections 4.1[19_TD$IF]–4.9. Semantic role of the subject. Subject pronoun usage is most frequent with those verbs whose subject is semantically a Cognizer (pensar ‘think’, creer ‘think, believe’). The least frequent use of subject pronouns is found with the verb sentir ‘feel, be sorry’, whose subject is semantically an Emoter. While attention tends to be focused on Cognizer subjects, in clauses with Emoter subjects it is focused on the stimulus of emotion. Number of arguments and transitivity. Subject pronouns are used less often with agentive verbs that select referential object arguments and not complement clauses (dar ‘give’, poner ‘put’, hacer ‘make, do’). With these verbs the syntactically obligatory object argument is likely to be at the focus of attention. Omitting the subject pronoun allows more attention to be focused on the object, the dative or locative argument. One-argument verbs included in the study can be divided in two groups: subject pronoun usage is rare with the more dynamic verbs ir ‘go’ and venir ‘come’ but frequent with the stative verbs ser ‘be’ and estar ‘be’. With dynamic verbs, attention is focused on the action expressed by the verb, while with the stative verbs the subject is more often at the focus of attention (cf. Silva-Corvala´n, 1997, 2001). However, rather than transitivity itself, it is the concomitant focusing of attention that affects the use of subject pronouns. Verb-specific factors. With some verbs, the presence or absence of the subject pronoun is dependent on the reading given to the verb. This is the case with the verb querer ‘want’, with which the use of the subject pronoun is connected to a more concrete meaning, while the subject pronoun tends to be left out when the verb is used in speech act formulae (cf. Davidson, 1996). With the verb ver ‘see’, subject pronoun usage is more frequent when the verb is used in a cognitive as opposed to sensory reading. With the verb decir ‘say’, the use and position of the subject pronoun depends on the discourse function of the verb and whether more attention is focused on the complement clause or the subject. Finally, with low-content verbs such as dar ‘give’, hacer ‘do, make’, and poner ‘put’, the object argument is largely responsible for the meaning of the clause, and therefore it is likely to be at the focus of attention. First vs. second person singular. The main differences attested between the first and second person singular can be attributed to the fact that a great deal of second person verb forms are used in questions. In polar questions, subject pronoun usage is rare because attention is focused on the polarity. In questions concerning the addressee’s personal commitment (e.g. with the verb creer ‘think, believe’), subject pronoun usage is more frequent. 5. Conclusions The goal of this paper was to deepen the understanding of the use of subject pronouns in Peninsular Spanish by examining the use of subject pronouns in connection with different verbs and by considering the influence of semantic factors on subject pronoun usage, applying both quantitative and qualitative methodology. The traditional explanation according to which subject pronouns are used to express contrast and emphasis has proved to be insufficient, as it accounts for a very small proportion of the cases where subject pronouns are used. As a consequence, the fact that verbs like creer ‘think, believe’ and pensar ‘think’ are used with subject pronouns more frequently than others cannot be solely attributed to the presumed frequent use of such verbs in contexts that favour a contrastive interpretation (cf. Enrı´quez, 1984:245; Ferna´ndez Soriano, 1999). The previous studies on subject pronoun usage have also been unable to account for the differences found between other verbs than those taking Cognizer subjects (i.e. verbs that are ‘‘used to express opinions’’), such as verbs with Emoter or Agent subjects. I suggest that a better way of explaining the different uses of subject pronouns has to do with the focusing of attention on the participants of the event or on the action expressed by the verb. The quantitative analysis carried out reveals that in addition to verbs favouring subject pronoun usage (e.g. creer ‘think, believe’, pensar ‘think’) there are also verbs associated with very infrequent usage of subject pronouns (e.g. sentir ‘feel’, ir ‘go’). In clauses where the verb is in the first or second person singular, low transitivity features favor the focusing of attention on the referent of the subject and thus increase the frequency of subject pronouns, while high transitivity features increase the likeliness of focusing attention either on the action expressed by the verb or on the referent of the object argument. This is reflected by more frequent subject pronoun usage in clauses characterized by lower transitivity. However, rather than transitivity itself, it is the focusing of attention associated with transitivity that affects the use and omission of subject pronouns. The traditional notions of ‘‘emphasis’’ and
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‘‘contrast’’ can also be considered subcases of focusing of attention: when a subject is emphasized or contrasted, more attention is focused on it, which is reflected by the use of a subject pronoun. The use of first and second person subject pronouns to indicate increased pragmatic weight or personal commitment of the speaker or addressee (Davidson, 1996) is also covered by the general notion of focusing of attention. As the qualitative analysis of the examples shows, there are also various other factors affecting subject pronoun usage with different verbs, such as the discourse functions of different verb forms. Many frequent collocations such as yo creopienso que ‘I think that’ or no se´ ‘I don’t know’ that serve to express the speaker’s subjective stance appear to be formulaic constructions, also referred to as prefabs (i.e. a prefabricated chunks) or emergent discourse patterns (cf. e.g. Hopper, 1987; Scheibman, 2001) where the use of the subject pronoun has grammaticalized to a high degree. The use of subject pronouns with different verbs is not governed by categorical rules but rather by soft constraints (cf. Du Bois, 2003) that can be revealed by quantitative analysis. However, in order to present a viable analysis for the uses of Peninsular Spanish subject pronouns, quantitative analysis alone is not enough and considering the discourse-pragmatic functions of different verbs and verb forms used in oral communication is also required. Acknowledgements I am especially grateful to Seppo Kittilä and Angela Bartens for reading and commenting on the manuscript at various stages. 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