The coherence between functional patterns and cognitive construction: Spanish usted and ustedes as displaced second persons

Abstract

Spanish pronouns usted and ustedes entail an apparent discordance between reference and grammatical form, insofar as they index addressees but correlate with third-person morphemes. Their use represents a cognitive displacement from the prototypical second person as a way to construct others in discourse. This study analyzes their functional variation in a corpus of Peninsular written and oral media language and according to several features, including object marking with the particle a, object agreement through verbal clitics, and the formulation and placement of subject pronouns. While some results suggest the persistence of third-person features in usted and ustedes, they more often behave like first- and second-person forms. This is put in connection with the higher cognitive salience of addressees as against external referents. In turn, the strong preference for dative clitics and postverbal subject pronouns—the latter resembling subject-agreement morphemes—is interpreted as contributing to the functional differentiation of a grammatical paradigm not exactly assimilable to either second- or third-person ones.