The pragmatic meaning of Spanish pronouns

Brad Davidson

Sun. 9-10:40 A

Spanish is pro-drop language in which subject pronouns are frequently omitted (80%); traditionally the function of overt subject pronouns has been regarded as 'emphatic' or 'contrastive'. I argue that their use is much more substantial and definable than this. Examining the appearance of first and second person pronouns in conversational data from Iberian Spanish (776 first person and 276 second person verbs, appearing with and without the pronoun), I identify a number of uses of the pronouns that are neither, or not merely, emphatic or contrastive, but are rather pragmatic (i.e., speech-act readings of verbs such as deicir 'to say': digo, '[I] say', but yo digo, 'I state/claim') or meta-linguistic (fighting for the floor). For example, in these data, the verb saber, 'to know', appears in the first person 95 times, 76 of them without the subject pronoun; of these latter, most appear as the epistemic parenthetical no sé, [I] don't know'('I don't know' ('I dunno')). When the verb occurs negatively in the first person with the pronoun, it seems that the function of the pronoun is to alert the listener that the verb is not an epistemic parenthetical, but should be read as the less conversationally common, less abstract, truth- functional saber. This can be seen clearly in examples where both uses of the verb are in evidence, one with the subject pronoun and one without, as in the example below:

No sé, yo sabía que, que pillaba por aquí la cosa...

[I] don't know, I knew that, that it was around there...

Rather than list the appearances of these pronouns under mutually exclusive functional headings, a more appropriate way of dealing with pragmatic phenomena is to allow for a multi-functional use of, in this case, the Spanish subject pronoun. I introduce the notion of 'pragmatic weight' as an umbrella term to cover all of these discourse-oriented uses of the pronoun: 'pragmatic' because the phenomenon is discourse oriented, and 'weight' because the function of the pronoun seems to be to add speaker commitment to the utterance, or to invoke an interpretation of the verb that is less abstract (as with possible epistemic parentheticals) or more meaningful (as with speech-act verbs). This type of multi-functional approach allows one to analyze the functions of different pragmatic phenomena without forcing tokens into mutually exclusive categories, which often is neither possible or desirable, e.g., when a topicalized subject pronoun is being used simultaneously for emphasis, to fight for the floor, and to invoke a truth-functional reading of an epistemic parenthetical like saber.