University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Personal uno in Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish

Bassa Vanrell, Maria del Mar

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/44503

Description

Title
Personal uno in Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish
Author(s)
Bassa Vanrell, Maria del Mar
Issue Date
2013
Keyword(s)
  • Linguistics
  • Spanish
  • Pronouns
Abstract
The pronoun uno ‘one’ in Spanish is known to have an impersonal use (RAE 2005). Less well-known is the use of uno to refer to ‘self’, mainly, the speaker. Some studies have noted this alternation of uno with first person personal pronoun yo (e.g. Toribio 2000; Gelabert-Desnoyer 2008; Flores-Ferrán 2009) and yet its precise referential status remains uncertain. The corpus results from the present study suggest that uno referring to the speaker is far from being scarce in either more colloquial or formal contexts. Following Gelabert-Desnoyer (2008), two main types of uno are identified: impersonal uno (UNOgen) and self-referential uno. The latter is subdivided into two subtypes: (i) uno referring only to the speaker (UNOyo) and (ii) uno referring to the speaker plus other potential referents (UNOyo+). I claim that these different types of uno emerge from two factors: (a) the focus placed on the speaker’s standpoint and (b) the potential domain of reference.
Publisher
Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISSN
0049-2388
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/44503
Copyright and License Information
Copyright © 2013 Maria del Mar Bassa Vanrell

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Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers PRIMARY
The online working papers of the UIUC Department of Linguistics