‘Pragmatic weight’ and Spanish subject pronouns: The pragmatic and discourse uses of ‘tú’ and ‘yo’ in spoken Madrid Spanish

Abstract

Spanish is a pro-drop language in which first and second person subject pronouns are frequently omitted (80%); traditionally the function of overt subject pronouns has been regarded as adding emphasis or to contrast explicit statements. I argue that their function is more similar to that of topicalized NPs, referred to as X-Forms by Klein-Andreu (1989a,b), and that their appearance is governed by their conversational function as discourse topics; they are used pragmatically and meta-linguistically to switch reference, for purposes of emphasis and negotiating conversational turns, and to add ‘pragmatic weight’ to frames of reference, epistemic parentheticals and potential speech act verbs. I introduce the notion of ‘pragmatic weight’ as a label that describes the ways in which subject pronouns are used to signal utterances as ‘less abstract’ or ‘more personally relevant’. Finally, some predictions are made as to what this description of the use of subject pronouns may imply for other, structurally similar pro-drop languages.