Shaping identities in interaction by cognitive meanings

Abstract

This is not an address forms research. The purpose of this paper is to study the variation of the Spanish singular and plural second-person object usted (es) (SPU object) by means of the cognitive properties of salience and informativeness. Each variant of the second-person object constitutes a meaningful possibility used by speakers to define their particular position in relation to the communicative situation where they participate, tightly connected to their communicative purposes during interaction. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of SPU object variation in a corpus of Contemporary Spanish (Corpus Interaccional del Español) show that variants are unevenly distributed across textual genres and socioprofessional affiliations of speakers and contribute to shape communicative styles based on the continuum of objectivity-subjectivity.