The participants as objects: Variation and meaning of first- and second-person object encoding in Spanish

Abstract

Syntactic functions are best conceptualized as prototypical associations of features at a variety of formal and semantic levels, which elements in actual clauses will match to different extents. In Spanish, the prototypical (accusative) object has a third-person, inanimate, non-autonomous entity as its referent. The encoding of the direct participants, i.e. the first and second persons, as syntactic objects will entail a displacement from the prototype that can have significant functional and meaningful effects. Based on a corpus of oral and written Peninsular Spanish, the study addresses the main patterns of quantitative variation and contextual choice of first- and second-person object encoding. Both the differences across syntactic functions, persons and numbers and the main features of formal variability within the clause—explicit formulation vs. morphological indexation, as well as preverbal vs. postverbal placement when formulated—are taken into account. It is concluded that the cognitive salience associated with first- and second-person objects makes them functionally and cognitively similar to syntactic subjects. In turn, the different choices related to their formal configuration can be used to modulate the degree of involvement attributed to their referents in the content of discourse.