The variable functions of addressing hearer-participants with Spanish second-person object forms in media discourse

Resumen

The Spanish second person singular and plural objects te/a ti (‘you/to you’ 2sg), le/a usted (‘you/to you’ 2sg), and les/a ustedes (‘you/to you’ 2pl) can be used to address hearer-participants (hearers and addressees) in audiovisual mass media, radio and television. Hearers and addressees are two categories that can be pragmatically isolated. This investigation analyzes these two functions in a corpus of contemporary Spanish (Corpus Interaccional del Español) as a case of syntactic variation. Variants serve to accomplish different communicative goals across genres, socio-professional affiliations, and sex/gender of speakers. They will be studied by means of the cognitive notions of salience and informativeness. Results indicate that there exist meaningful differences in how these functions are performed by people belonging to different social categories and also that they create diverse communicative styles based on the objectivity gradual cognitive dimension.