It can be us or you. The desubjectification of viewpoint through person choice in Spanish oral and written media discourse

Abstract

The deictic anchoring of discourse through grammatical persons and their contextual referential scopes is among the most basic resources for clause-level viewpoint establishment. This paper presents an analysis of person choice as a viewpoint-desubjectifying strategy in a corpus of Peninsular Spanish media texts. Two grammatical choices, namely audience-inclusive plural first persons and speaker-inclusive singular second ones, are analyzed and compared regarding both their normalized frequencies across oral and written media genres and the specific discursive contexts where they tend to appear. It is shown that the quantitative and qualitative sides of person choice are closely linked, patterns of genre variation being indexical of different ways of viewpoint construction in context. The plural first person, blending the speaker's viewpoint with that of the audience, highlights interpersonal involvement and is characteristic of genres and contexts where sharedness is a prominent pragmatic value. In turn, the singular second person co-occurs with speakers' personal stances and experiences that are desubjectified through viewpoint displacement from the speaker towards the audience. Furthermore, the strong association of the latter choice with conversational discourse suggests the need to nuance the frequent straightforward identification of orality with subjectivity and that of literacy with objectivity.