The article «Infinitives, discourse viewpoint, and referential interpretation of the initiator in Spanish digital news discourse», by Miguel A. Aijón Oliva, will be published in Pragmatics. Being the official quarterly journal of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), it is one of the most relevant publications in the field.
The study examines the possible intended references of the initiator — agent or experiencer — of Spanish infinitives when this participant is not clearly identified in the context. Infinitives are characterized by the absence of tense and aspect morphemes, as well as of person and number ones. These verbal forms have been noted to construe events as independent of specific coordinates of person, place or time, that is, as ungrounded according to the communicative situation. While they often appear as the nuclei of subordinate clauses that perform nominal functions within the main one, they can also form independent predications and produce peculiar pragmatic effects.
It is debatable whether infinitives have a subject as finite verbs do. Despite their functional similarities to nouns, when used as verbal forms they retain the argument structure of the verb in question. At the same time, they lack person and number morphemes for subject agreement. In formal approaches it has been assumed that they can be controlled by some nominal element in the context. In some cases, though, there is no contextually retrievable agent, as happens in (1).
Hasta 115 sanciones ha impuesto la pasada noche la Policía Local de Salamanca por incumplir las medidas en marcha a consecuencia de la pandemia. [suc-S24H-250421-tex]
‘Last night, the Salamanca local police issued up to 115 sanctions for infringing the current regulations in response to the pandemic.’
While in the episodic context of (1) it is easy to infer the existence of specific people — even if in a considerable number — who infringed local regulations, in (2) the event cambiar la cerradura ‘to change the door lock’ and its initiator are construed as more generic. Such an interpretation is probably favored by the generic uses of the second person in the subsequent clauses.
Lo lógico es cambiar la cerradura cuando te mudas a una casa que no es tuya ya que no sabes quien ha podido estar antes [suc-S24H-150421-com]
‘It’s only natural to change the door lock when you move into a home that is not yours, since you don’t know who may have been there before.’
The investigation is based on a corpus of written digital discourse including news items and the comments to them submitted by the readership. The materials were collected during the year 2021 from the websites of three digital newspapers based in the Spanish Peninsular city of Salamanca, namely La Gaceta, Salamanca 24 Horas and Salamanca RTV al Día. Four basic referential interpretations of the initiator are discussed: external references, generic ones, the audience, and the writer. They largely depend on contextual elements functioning as viewpoint builders and including the semantics of the predicate, spatial and temporal locatives, grammatical marks of the direct participants, and other defocusing constructions.
In fact, quantitative analysis reveals patterns of co-occurrence between the referential categories and the different types of viewpoint builders. Such references are also unequally distributed across the two kinds of textual sequences considered, with only external references being relatively frequent in the informational discourse of the news. The results underscore the complexity of the interpretive processes involved in reference assignment; while all uses of the infinitive are semantically unified by its function of construing events as ungrounded, they can produce quite different pragmatic outcomes. Further analysis of the quantitative and qualitative patterns of co-occurrence among grammatical constructions seems fundamental to enhance knowledge about the general cognitive mechanisms for the configuration and interpretation of discourse viewpoint.
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