Toward the prevalence of a personal use of impersonal uno in Colombian Spanish

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-29-2023

Abstract

This variationist study explores the alternation between the pronouns uno 'one' and yo 'I' in Colombian Spanish using data from the PRESEEA Medellín corpus. We test the hypothesis that, in Colombian Spanish, uno is being recast to the point that it functions as a variant of the first-person singular subject pronoun yo. We aim to go beyond the well-established pronombrista line of subject pronoun research with a variationist analysis of the alternation between uno and yo that examines, among other things, the role of stance and the focus of attention in terms of predictors that include transitivity, verb semantics, coreference, type of discourse, and sentence polarity. Our findings uncover the strongest conditioning effect of tense, mood and aspect as well as robust effects of transitivity, discourse genre, polarity, and type of preceding subject. Thus, the uno/yo alternation constitutes a linguistic variable in its own right.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages

First Page

203

Last Page

236

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