Talking about ‘others’. Referential readings and pragmatic functions of non-phoric plural third persons in Spanish media discourse

Abstract

The use of plural third-person morphemes with no recoverable subject (e.g. dicen ‘[they] say’) has been described as an impersonal resource in Spanish. However, its actual function is to construct an external, non-identified human agent that can have different degrees of specificity. The present study investigates the referential interpretations and pragmatic meanings acquired by this construction in a corpus of Peninsular Spanish press and radio discourse. A discursive-cognitive continuum is proposed where non-phoric uses represent the extreme case of a core meaning shared by all plural third persons, and which can be paraphrased as ‘others’. Three basic referential readings are distinguished in media interactions, namely quasi-individual, quasi-universal and institutional ones. Their respective quantitative distribution is analyzed across the written and oral sections of the corpus, as well as across three different socioprofessional groups including media professionals, public figures and anonymous individuals. Altogether, the construction is more frequent in oral discourse and especially in anonymous individuals, while media professionals rarely resort to it. The patterns are subsequently interpreted by examining the communicative goals fulfilled by each of the three readings in specific contexts, all of which are seen as particular manifestations of the inherent meaning of the construction.