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ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

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'Pragmatic weight' and Spanish subject pronouns"

The pragmatic and discourse uses of
'tti' and 'yo' in spoken Madrid Spanish
Brad D a v i d s o n *
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2150. USA

Received November 1994; revised version October 1995

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, struc-
turally similar pro-drop languages.

1. Introduction

Spanish, along with other southern Romance tongues (e.g. Catalan, Italian), is a
language which marks person and number agreement on the conjugated verb. This
allows the listener to disambiguate, in all tenses and for most persons, the intended
subject of a verb without the presence of an overt subject. In these languages, the
overt subjects of verbs are optional, and may be 'dropped'. This paper will examine
the role of pronoun subjects that are not dropped, specifically first and second per-

~ I would like to acknowledge and thank all of the people with whom I have discussed the ideas in this
paper, as well as the following people for their help and useful commentary on this and earlier drafts of
this paper: Elizabeth Traugott, Penelope Eekert, Mary Pratt, Ivan Sag, Scott Schwenter, Stuart Tannock,
Tom Wasow, and two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Pragmatics. All responsibility for mis-
takes is of course my own.
* E-mail: davidson@csli.stanford.edu

0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

SSDI 0 3 7 8 - 2 1 6 6 ( 9 5 ) 0 0 0 6 3 - 1
544 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

son subject pronouns [hereafter SPs] in spoken Spanish. I argue that these pronouns
are not merely emphatic or contrastive subjects, as they have commonly been
described, but rather that they are related in their functional usage to topicalized,
that is, utterance-initial, NPs, of the type called X-Forms by Klein-Andreu
(1989a,b; see below, section 2.1). Moreover, the fact that SPs refer to either one or
the other of the participants in a conversational dyad means that they have come to
take on the function of adding 'pragmatic weight' to a speaker's utterance; that is to
say, they are used to increase the speaker's stake in what is being said, and as such
will be interpreted as either signaling an increased speaker commitment to the infor-
mation in the utterance, or as adding semantic 'weight' to the verb to which they
may be associated, either signaling it as 'less abstract' (truth-functional versus non-
truth-functional uses) or 'more substantial' (speech acts versus truth-functional
uses).

1.1. 'Pro-drop'

The morphological marking of person, tense, and number on the conjugated

verb itself is what allows pronouns to be dropped in pro-drop languages; this
marking may be, however, ambiguous, to a greater or lesser degree. Spanish,
like Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, and other pro-drop languages which employ a
' T - V ' (tu-vous) system of second person address, uses verb forms that mark for
the relative status of a speaker's interlocutors. In Spanish these forms are called
by the subject pronouns that they inflect for, namely, tt~ for informal or 'inferior'
interlocutors, and usted for formal or 'superior' interlocutors. In the case of
Spanish, this makes third person forms of verbs indistinguishable from second
person 'V' forms of the same number, in all tenses; there is a further ambiguity
in the subjunctive and in all of the imperfect tenses between first person
singular, third person singular and second person singular 'V', as can be seen in
Table 1.

Table 1
Conjugation of Spanish verb forms in the present simple and past imperfect tenses of estar, 'to be':

Person Present simple tense Past imperfect tense

Singular Plural Singular Plural

First (yo/nosotros) estoy estamos estaba est~bamos

Second (tt~/vosotros) esffts est~iis estabas est~ibais
Third (Usted(es)) est~ est~in estaba estaban

The third person, then, is the form most ambiguously marked for subject agree-
ment in Spanish, whereas for the first and second person 'T' forms the verbs are
marked completely unambiguously in the simple present, the future, and the preterit
tenses. It is for this reason that this paper will look exclusively at the appearance of
first person and second person 'T' pronouns in conversation, where the use of first
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 545

and second person forms is more frequent, and where simple narrative tenses (pre-
sent and preterit) predominate; thus any appearance of the first person SP yo or the
second person SP tfi will not be for purposes of clarifying the intended subject of the
verb, and will have to be explained in other terms.
The appearance of these SPs has been looked at quantitatively in (at least) two
pro-drop languages, Spanish and Portuguese, and it has been found that their
appearance, in both spoken and written forms, is relatively rare, hovering around
20% appearance (Paredes Silva, 1993; Poplack, 1980). The present data reflect
the same pattern: SPs occur in sentences with verbs marked properly for their
appearance roughly 20% of the time. Their use therefore seems to be relatively
marked.
One final note about Spanish is in order before I look closely at where and why
SPs do appear. Spanish is an S-V-O language canonically, if one is referring to a
sentence with a transitive verb and full NP arguments. The fact that subjects are
optional in Spanish, however, makes this reliance on word order somewhat less crit-
ical than it would be for a non pro-drop language (i.e., English or Chinese). In fact,
subject and object position are relatively free in Spanish; both subjects and objects
which are "direct functions" of the verb (Alsina, 1993: 410) may be felicitously and
grammatically placed at the front of the sentence (topicalized), as may be seen in
examples (1), (3), and (4).

1.2. The data

The data I will be looking at in this paper, unless otherwise indicated, comes from
the 1981 study El habla de la ciudad de Madrid, conducted by the Instituto Miguel
de Cervantes and published by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientfficas
in Madrid, Spain. There are several sections to the study, each containing transcripts
of different types of conversational data, ranging from formal interviews to group
conversations. I will be using the data from the section entitled Difilogos Secretos,
which contains four conversations (encuestas XXI-XXIV, pp. 399-449), recorded
surreptitiously. The book states that "all of the informants are students at the Uni-
versidad Complutense. All of them are madrilehos [natives of Madrid], residents in
Madrid". All claims about the nature of SPs in Spanish conversation that are based
on the data are thus claims about informal, university educated Madrid Spanish con-
versations, although it is unlikely that data from other Castillian-speaking regions of
Spain would be remarkably different.
These recordings, which took place some time in the late 1970s or very early
1980s and which were published in book format in 1981, are transcribed ortho-
graphically, with only major disfluencies and repairs present in the transcription,
as well as half-words, unintelligible utterances (transcribed as '...V...' in (8a) and
(1 l b), below), and various exclamations (e.g. ; H u y / in (17b), below); punctuation
appears to reflect intonational patterns, with a comma being inserted for a short
pause and a period or three points for a long pause, although a certain attempt at
making the transcripts grammatical, to the possible prejudice of faithful transcrip-
tion, also seems to be in evidence. These recordings were made as part of a project
546 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

to record various types of speech in roughly similar circumstances in major cities

around the Spanish-speaking parts of the world, such as Bogot~i and Mexico City,
as well as Madrid. I have looked exclusively at the Madrid data because, in fact,
the 'roughly similar' circumstances were not similar enough for a good compari-
son between conversational recordings; for example, while the surreptitious
Madrid data recorded conversations between peers, the Mexico City 'secret
recordings' were made of interview sessions between an interviewee and an inter-
viewer.
I have chosen to look at conversational data because, as Klein-Andreu (1989b:
25) points out,

"references to personal experience, and other manifestations of speaker 'involvement', are more charac-
teristic of speech than they are of writing ... spoken language ... reflect[s] a motivated, and therefore sys-
tematic, preference for organization ofa difs[~,rentkind than that preferred for written language." (italics
in original)

This motivated preference may influence the use of SPs in conversation, simply
because the co-presence of a hearer will directly affect the use of second person pro-
nouns; in a related fashion the egodeictic first person pronouns may be harnessed for
purposes other than signaling the subject, for example to gain the floor in conversa-
tion, something which is not necessary in written texts. It is my belief that written
data may indeed use X-Form SPs as topic markers in a similar way to SP use in con-
versational data; 1 however, the claims this paper makes rest exclusively on spoken
language, specifically Madrid Spanish.
One final note about the data is that it is taken from a relatively narrow social and
age strata, that of university students, and from a series of face-to-face conversations
between people who don't seem to know each other outside of the university envi-
ronment. While students may be used to meeting and working with other students
whom they barely know, making the data 'natural', the self-presentational aspects of
giving a good first impression, maintaining group norms with an unknown member
of the group, and other social factors unique to these types of situations, will cer-
tainly have an effect on the topics and, more importantly, the amount of self-refer-
ence found in these conversations.

2. Subject pronouns in Spanish

Since SPs appear notably infrequently, and since verbs inflected to agree with
them function perfectly well without them, it remains to be seen why they get used
at all. A close examination of the data reveals that not only do SPs typically precede
the verb in the sentence (96.8%, see below), but that they may, and commonly do,
precede the entire utterance (aside from parentheticals), as can be seen in (1):

See Paredes Silva (1993) for a similar account of SP appearance in written Brazilian Portuguese.
 B. Davidson / Journal o['Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 547

(1) O sea, 2 yo por la noche, a las once de la noche, estoy

' I t ' s that, I at night, at eleven o ' c l o c k at night, [I] am
que me caigo.
that me (refl.) [I] fall.'
'Me, at night, at 11 o ' c l o c k at night, I ' m so tired I ' m falling down.'3

It is not possible, in any traditional analysis of Spanish syntax, to determine with any
certainty if the SP yo is the subject of the second verb, me caigo, or if instead me
caigo has a ' d r o p p e d ' pronoun; for that matter, an argument could be made that both
verbs have a dropped subject, and that the SP is a syntactic adjunct. 4 The fact that
most SPs appear at the beginning of an utterance, and do not need to appear adjacent
to the verb, argues that, as well as (potential) subjects, SPs should be considered
potential topics, that is, utterance-initial NPs which tell the listener what the sentence
is ' a b o u t ' ; 5 in this sense 'topics' and ' X - F o r m s ' are related terms, the latter being a
subset of the former. The SP in (1) seems to be functioning as both the subject of
two verbs, and as the topic of the sentence as well. This 'multiple function' of the SP
is c o m m o n , and something that this analysis attempts to deal with by placing all of
the phenomena examined in this paper under the umbrella term 'pragmatic weight'.
With this type of analysis, it is not necessary to determine if an utterance-initial SP
is being used to fight for the floor, add weight to an argument, or trigger a speech-
act reading of the following verb, because it may simply be stated that, by adding
pragmatic weight, the SP can be doing all of these things.

2.1. X - F o r m s and subject~topics

In data from Peninsular (Iberian) Spanish, Klein-Andreu identified a specific type

of NP that is prescriptively ungrammatical, yet is regularly produced by native
speakers in conversation. These NPs, or ' X - F o r m s ' as she calls them, refer to ani-
mate entities, are 'overwhelmingly discourse-initial', 'formally detached', 6 generally
"an 'experiencer' of some kind", and are "central to the particular discourse in
which they occur" (Klein-Andreu, 1989a,b), as in (2a):

(2a) Los cdrvidos se les cae todos los afios el cuerno.

'The deer it-falls (3SG) them ( D A T PL) all the years the antler.' (Klein-
Andreu, 1989b: 26, example 1)

2 For a more complete analysis of the discourse marker "o sea', see Schwenter (1996).
3 All conversational data, unless otherwise cited, will be from El habla de la ciudad de Madrid.
a Ivan Sag, personal communication.
For more detailed information about both the sentence-initial position of topics cross-linguistically
and the functional uses of topics, see Keenan (1976), Prince (1981), Foley and Van Valin (1985),
Schiffrin (1987, 1988), among others.
6 It is not clear what is meant here by 'detachment', although it bears a striking similarity to the possi-
ble adjunct-SP analysis alluded to earlier. For the purposes of this paper, I will assume that the state of
'attachment' (as the logical opposite of 'detachment') refers to an NP which fills a spot in the argument
structure of the main verb in the sentence, in the sense of what Alsina (1993) calls 'functions' of the verb.
548 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

It is clear from both their position and their function within the utterance that these
X-Forms are serving as discourse topics, used to focus attention on NPs that repre-
sent new information or NPs about which new information will be forthcoming, with
the exception that these forms are not 'detached', as will be discussed below.
The issue of detachment is an interesting one: if SPs are subjects, they are
attached, and if they are X-Forms, as defined, they may not be attached: X-Forms,
like topics, are defined as explicitly detached elements which refer to object NPs.
Looking at Italian, a pro-drop language closely related to Spanish, Foley and Van
Valin (1985) present the following examples as proof that for all languages, topics
must be detached:

(3a) Ho fatto a Roberto aspetta' un 'ora

have-I made to Robert wait an hour
'I made Robert wait an hour'
(3b) A Roberto l'ho fatto aspetta' un 'ora
to Roberto him have-I made wait an hour
'Roberto, I made him wait for an hour'
(Foley and Van Valin, 1985: 357, example 145)

Foley and Van Valin state that (3a) has no topic, and that (3b) has an external topic,
which is the preposed object A Roberto; the attached object is the clitic l', 'to him',
in l'ho. Had they included a third sentence, however, with the Italian SP 1o, 'I',
appearing in initial position and immediately preceding the VP ho fatto, they would
have been presented with the question 'what is the relationship between an initial
subject and a topic in a pro-drop language?' The topic in (3b) may very well be
detached, but it is not referring to the subject of the following verb; since in Span-
ish, as in Italian, SPs may appear in the discourse-initial slot, are morphologically in
subject case, and are frequently followed by a verb inflected to match them in per-
son and number, their syntactic relation is by no means clearly extra-sentential.
The property of detachment is thus not easily defined, especially when one is
dealing with optional subjects in a pro-drop language. I argue that if we exclude the
notion of detachment from the canonical description of X-Forms, and also topics, we
can account for much of the behavior exhibited by SPs in conversation. The argu-
ment that X-Forms are detached stems from examples that have topics that are later
introduced as objects into the sentence, as in (2a), repeated here:

(2a) Los c~rvidos se les cae todos los afios el cuerno.

'The deer it-falls (3SG) them (DAT PL) all the years the antler.' (Klein-
Andreu, 1989b: 26, example 1)

This example was presented in Klein-Andreu's paper without a translation; presum-

ably this is because the utterance is not well-formed, according to traditional, pre-
scriptive rules of Spanish grammar. In order for the X-Form los cdrvidos to be gram-
matically well-formed by normative rules it would need to be preceded by the
preposition a, so that the utterance would have the form in (2b):
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 549

(2b) 'A los c6rvidos se les cae ...'

'To the deer it-falls ...'
(= 'Deer's antlers fall off every year.')
(Klein-Andreu, 1989b: 26, example lb)

However, (2a) is well-formed for conversational purposes, provided that there is a

pause after Los c~rvidos, and it is important that the title of Klein-Andreu's article is
'Why speech seems ungrammatical', rather than '... is ungrammatical' (my empha-
sis). The translation of (2a) would be essentially the same as that given for (2b), with
the exception that c~rvidos in (2a) is not correctly presented as a preposed object; it
is, rather, a topicalized NP, of a type that occurs regularly in Spanish speech, and so
must be re-categorized as a different type of grammatical phenomenon, which Klein-
Andreu calls an X-Form.
Returning to the issue of detachment, it is claimed that one possible reason X-
Forms are not "morphosyntactically integrated" is that "presentation by an X-Form
contributes important referents into the discourse, which subsequently are incorpo-
rated in ... integrated form" (Klein-Andreu, 1989b: 35). This claim is equivalent to
stating that, for an X-Form to be appropriately (i.e., grammatically) used in conver-
sation, it must represent an entity that is later introduced in the sentence as either a
direct or an indirect (oblique) function of the verb. This seems an appropriate condi-
tion, as can be seen in the (constructed and admittedly ridiculous) example (2c):

(2c) *Los cgrvidos, se me cae todos los afios el cuerno.

The deer it-falls (3SG) me (DAT SG) all the years the antler.
*'The deer, my antlers fall off every year.'

It is not only that (2c) is semantically bad; there is simply no part of the argument
structure that corresponds to the preposed X-Form, which makes it syntactically bad
as well. Thus the proper relationship of an X-Form, and perhaps topics in general, to
the sentence that follows it appears to be a constraint on its being co-referential with
some NP that fills an argument slot of the main verb in the following utterance. This
constraint seems to have no exceptions.

2.2. Subject pronouns

A similar, but somewhat modified, constraint, related to what Westcoat and Zae-
hen (1991) call 'functional uncertainty', seems to govern the appropriate uses of top-
icalized (utterance-initial) SPs. With specific reference to how topicalized NPs are
understood by a hearer, Westcoat and Zaenen (1991:132) propose

"an infinite set of what one might think of as guesses about the topic's second function, and [the hearer]
then determine[s] if any of these guesses yields a consistent, complete, and coherent f[unctional]-
structure."

The 'infinite set' of possible functions is of course limited by what is being topical-
ized; SPs will typically relate to a subject or an object function, and speakers can be
550 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

legitimately a s s u m e d to know this. W h a t this proposal means in the context o f this

p a p e r is that, while X - F o r m s and SPs m a y be ' d e t a c h e d ' in that they do not relate in
prescriptively appropriate m o r p h o s y n t a c t i c w a y s to following NPs that fill an argu-
m e n t slot o f the verb (i.e., los c~rvidos, and not a los c~rvidos, preceding les in
(2a,b)), speakers are perfectly able to relate these topicalized NPs to the appropriate
referent in the f o l l o w i n g discourse, p r o v i d e d there is some argument that they are
coreferential with. Again, there seem to be no exceptions to this rule; all SPs in the
data set studied were either the a g r e e m e n t - c o n t r o l l i n g subjects of the m a i n verb in
the f o l l o w i n g utterance, or were coreferential with an N P that filled an argument slot
o f the f o l l o w i n g verb, as in (4): 7

(4) Yo, c o m o m e ha p a s a d o con 6stos.

I, h o w to me ( D A T ) [it] has passed with these.
'I, the time these have given m e '

In this e x a m p l e the SP is animate, referential, discourse-initial, salient, an experi-

encer, and subsequently introduced as a m o r p h o s y n t a c t i c a l l y integrated dative pro-
noun me. It is also a sentence which, like K l e i n - A n d r e u ' s X - F o r m s , most speakers of
Spanish regard as b a d l y formed, regardless o f whether or not they are aware that the
e x a m p l e comes, not from a constructed data set, but from the transcription o f a
recorded conversation. A typical response is that either: (a) the pronoun yo should be
c h a n g e d to the prepositional phrase a mi, which w o u l d have the same effect as
changing los c~rvidos to a los c~rvidos in e x a m p l e s (2a,b); or (b) the sentence is in
fact a clause, and that it is not c o m p l e t e - m a n y speakers assume, when reading this
e x a m p l e out o f context, that the p r e p o s e d SP will eventually b e c o m e the subject o f a
verb further on in the utterance. Neither o f these responses, however, explains the
data appropriately, the former because, as with X - F o r m s , people a r e n ' t a l w a y s say-
ing a mi (and exactly w h y they a r e n ' t needs to be addressed), and the latter b e c a u s e
there s i m p l y i s n ' t m o r e to the sentence in e x a m p l e (4). This can be seen in (4'),
which gives the sentence following the utterance begun in (4):

(4') lZstos me los c o m p r e ... y no, no ...

These to m e ( D A T ) them [I] b o u g h t ... and no, no...
'I b o u g h t these (for myself) ... and no, no ...'

v There is one exception to this generalization, which is situations in which the SP is used to preface
quoted material, as in the example below:
...; y mi padre dice: 'Nada, tt~ tranquila, i,eh? Tt~ habla despacio, que siempre hablas muy deprisa'.
Y yo: 'Sf, sf, pap~i.' iJe, je!
..4 and my father says: 'Nothing, you be calm, eh? Speak slowly, because you always talk very fast'.
And 1: 'Yes, yes, dad'. Ha ha!
In cases such as this, the SP seems to be acting as an inquit, or speaker identifying marker; this function
of the SP seems to be outside of the descriptive framework of a pragmatic weight analysis of SP use, but
since none of the other previous discussions of SP appearance account for these occurrences, and since
the SP itself seems to bear, in these cases, very little relation to what is said afterwards, this exception
will not be considered to be of great theoretical importance.
 B. Davidson /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 551

The informant goes on to describe how 'these', which are a pair of pants, have given
her no end of trouble. The fact that there is a topicalized NP (~stos) in (4'), and that
the two have been transcribed as belonging to different intonational contours, leads
to the conclusion that (4) and (4') do not form a single sentence. Unless one is will-
ing to allow SPs to be the control subject of following verbs in different sentences,
it is not possible to find a following verb for which the SP yo in (4) is a subject.
It is important to note as well that by previous definition, X-Forms are "much
more likely to be animate" than the grammatical subjects (Klein-Andreu, 1989b:
38); the grammatical subject of (4) is a phonetically null pronoun which would cor-
respond to a thematic dummy subject 'it' in English, and so the placement and use
of the SP in (4) is somewhat predictable using an X-Form analysis of SP appearance.
But while the SP in (4) is by all criteria an X-Form, the SP in (1) is different in that
it is also a subject, or at very least coreferential to the possibly dropped subject of
one or both of the verbs. As the principle of functional uncertainty gives an expla-
nation of how X-Forms are in fact related to the argument structure of the following
verb (albeit without reference to how morphological 'mismatches' are dealt with),
this difference in syntactic 'attachedness' will not be considered as important as the
number of similarities displayed by these and most other SPs to X-Forms. Most sig-
nificantly, SPs seem frequently to behave as X-Forms do. Therefore, for the remain-
der of this paper, the definition of X-Forms in Spanish will be extended to include
SPs that display all of the characteristics of X-Form NPs as defined by Klein-
Andreu, with the exception of detachedness from the following clause.

2.3. Pragmatic weight

It was stated above that it is not sufficient to point out that speakers regularly pro-
duce sentences which other speakers, when given time to reflect, consider ungram-
matical; it is necessary to also explain why speakers are speaking this way, and to
what effect. The argument in favor of a notion of pragmatic weight is that if SPs are
viewed merely as optional, overt subject markers, there is no reason for speakers
ever to use them; they are in effect bits of redundant morphology. Other accounts of
SP use which describe 'emphatic' or 'contrastive' uses of the SP when occurring
with a verb are not wrong, but neither are they accounting for the whole range of SP
uses: examples like (2) show that SPs in Spanish are not always coreferential with
the subjects of following verbs. It is my contention that speakers are using SPs to
add 'pragmatic weight' to their utterance, a theoretical label which subsumes the
notions of 'emphasis' that other authors have proposed, but which explains more
fully how speakers use the SPs to disambiguate possible epistemic parentheticals,
trigger speech act readings of certain verbs, and increase their 'stake' in whatever
they are saying, either in an argument or in a statement of belief; it also serves to
explain such meta-linguistic uses of the SP as signaling an attempt to either take or,
in the case of utterance-final second person SPs, hand over the floor. All of these
uses will be discussed further below, in section 3. The theoretical label itself has
been chosen because, in analyzing the conversational data, it was found that what
seems to govern the felicitous appearance of SPs in conversational Spanish are a
552 B. Davidson /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

series of primarily pragmatic norms, and those uses which have been listed above all
seem to have one central theme, which is that the speaker is increasing his or her
commitment to the utterance (in the case of floor-fighting, speech acts, emphasis,
and during arguments), or is signaling a more 'concrete' usage of verbs that have
been become 'more abstract' (in the case of possible epistemic parentheticals): in
short, the speaker is adding weight to the utterance.
This account is preferable to analyzing the rules concerning usage of overt SPs as
dealing either with 'emphasis' or with 'contrastiveness', because it gives both a
more general and encompassing explanation of what speakers are using SPs for,
functionally, and also explains some apparent pragmatic and meta-linguistic uses
which neither of the previous labels accounted for. While most accounts of emphatic
or contrastive uses of the SP in Spanish have made an either/or distinction (an SP is
either emphatic or contrastive), an analysis based on pragmatic weight does not
imply that an SP will be used in any one utterance in a unique pragmatic way; it may
be used, simultaneously, for emphatic purposes, to fight for the floor, and to topical-
ize the speaker. This view of the (potential) multiple function of SPs seems to
account best for the data, as an analysis that tried to neatly categorize each appear-
ance of an SP as belonging to one and only one functional category would quickly
be forced to make ad hoc decisions about categorizations, as will be shown below.

3. Analysis of the data

A total of 1,052 first and second person verbs were found in the four surrepti-
tiously recorded conversations. Of these, 801 (76.1%) occur without the SP. One
issue that needs to be raised now, however, is that certain Spanish verbs appear
almost exclusively without the SP; two of these verbs (saber, 'to know', andfijarse,
lit. 'fix oneself on'; a more realistic translation would be 'pay attention to', or 'lis-
ten', 'look', used conversationally) are typical candidates for becoming Epistemic
Parentheticals, that is, stance markers, used by the hearer to situate him or herself in
relation to his or her conviction about the preceding or following statement (Thomp-
son and Mulac, 1991); a discussion of how pragmatic discourse factors determine
the appearance of SPs with these verbs is presented in section 3.2 below. A second
issue is that of imperatives, which, unsurprisingly, appear exclusively in second per-
son. There are 67 second person imperatives in the four conversations studied; only
4 of them (5.9%) appear with an SP. This percentage, however, while low, is not
markedly different from the percentage of SP use with the 'other' category of verbs
in the second person with the imperative removed (12 SPs out of 154 verbs =7.7%);
for this reason they have been included in the second person data.
Another issue which needs to be looked at is where in the utterance these SPs
appear when they are used; l have claimed earlier in this paper that SPs are fre-
quently topics, and some of this argument is based on their frequent appearance in
utterance-initial position, a defining characteristic of topics. Of the total of 801 SP
tokens, only 26 appear in a postposed position, that is, after the inflected verb. Of
these 26 tokens, 19 appear in the first person, and the remaining 7 appear in the sec-
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 553

ond person, usually in cases where the speaker is handing over the floor. The
remaining 775 SP tokens (96.8%) all appear before the verb; as will be seen in the
conversational data examined below, these appear most frequently towards the
beginning of an utterance, and usually are in utterance-initial (topic) position.
Table 2 shows the distribution of the VP with an SP in first and second person,
isolating the potential Epistemic Parentheticals (EPARs) and the verb decir, 'to say',
which is the verb that appears most frequently in the corpus, and which displays
interesting variations in interpretation, depending in part on the presence or absence
of an SP.

Table 2
The occurrence of overt SPs with tensed first- and second-person verbs

Verb With SP (Total N) %

1st. person
saber 21 (95) 22.1%
fijarse 0 (0) 00.0%
decir 11 (41 ) 26.8 %
other 193 (640) 30.2%
Total 225 (776) 29.0%

2nd. person
saber 5 (26) 19.2%
fijarse 4 (17) 23.5%
decir 1 (12) 8.3%
other 16 (221) 7.2%
Total 26 (276) 9.4%

What becomes apparent from looking at the data in Table 2 is that first person
verbs occur almost three times more frequently than second person verbs, and that
there is a nearly 20% difference in the percentage of appearance of the SP between
first and second person inflected verbs. This primacy of first person forms in con-
versation will not be discussed, except in passing; it seems that conversational data
upholds the notion that what we most like to talk about is ourselves, and that the
self-presentational aspects of these conversations may be in evidence. However, the
difference in percentage between first and second person verbs appearing with an SP
is important, and strengthens the argument that SPs are not merely used for emphatic
purposes, but also to negotiate turns and to signal one's desire to take the floor.
The differences in percentage of appearance of the SP between first and second
person verb forms are found primarily in three of the categories: SPs are used more
frequently in the first person to fight for the floor than they are in the second, as is
to be expected (the three instances of second person 'floor-fighting' appear as sig-
nals ending a speaker's turn and thus are 'handing over' the floor); SPs are used in
the second person more frequently for purposes of emphasis than in the first person,
perhaps as a device to underline differences in speaker/listener perspectives; and the
554 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

SP is used only in the first person to signal a speech-act reading of certain verbs (e.g.
creer, 'believe', pensar, 'think', decir, 'say'). The remainder of this section will be
spent explaining the various uses of SPs in conversation, how they are reflected in
the data, and how an analysis of their appearance that is based on the notion of prag-
matic weight would work.

3.1. Emphasis/contrastiveness

Many analyses of the appearance of SPs in conversational data in Spanish speak

about how they are frequently used for purposes of 'emphasis', although this term,
like 'aboutness' when used to talk about topics, is not a very precise definition of
what SPs are used for. Central to the notion of emphasis is the idea that the subject
of the verb is made more salient when the SP is present: Paredes Silva claimed that,
for Brazilian Portuguese (another pro-drop Romance language), the presence of an
SP "lend(s) prominence to what a given person does or thinks in relation to the
actions or thoughts of another person" (Paredes Silva, 1993: 41).
Chafe (1976) also talked about the use of an SP in languages in which the mor-
phological marking of a verb makes an overt subject unnecessary, claiming that in
such cases independent pronouns are used for 'contrastiveness'. I will make use of
Chafe's less structural (i.e., without reference to position or pragmatic function
within the utterance) definition of 'topic', which he uses to refer to 'the frame within
which the sentence holds', and use it here as what I will call the 'frame' of the con-
versation, that is, the shared experiential world in which a conversation takes place.
In this view of 'frame', SPs are used to contrast an utterance with what the speaker
feels is a more normal state of affairs within the shared experiential world; that is, a
speaker will use an SP to single out the content of an utterance as something differ-
ent from what is to be expected in the speaker's world of "shared, 'salient knowl-
edge' " (Prince, 1988). This is in addition to the more widely claimed uses of 'con-
trastiveness', which are usually demonstrated in examples like those in (5a-c), in
which a conversation about hem length is taking place:

(5a) C - O muy corto, muy corto o muy largo, muy largo ...
'Either very short, very short or very long, very long ...'
(5b) B - No, yo muy corto, muy corto nunca lo he llevado; ni hasta los pies. No he
tenido nada hasta los pies.
'No, I have never worn it very short, very short; nor to the feet. I ' v e never
owned anything (that went) to the feet.'
(5c) C - Yo sf, yo tuve un abrigo.
'I have, I had an overcoat.'

This use of contrastiveness, that is to contrast a speaker's claims or beliefs with

the claims or beliefs that another speaker has expressed, is the most immediately
obvious type of contrastiveness. It is not, however, necessary to contrast the infor-
mation in one utterance with information explicitly stated in another; one may also
contrast one's claims with implicit claims or beliefs of the conversational group, as
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 555

in (6a-e). The situation is that B has just told an amusing story about a professor
who gave her a passing grade for doing almost no work. A is responding to the con-
clusion of B's story, in which B says that she passed the course although she did not
really take the final exam:

(6a) A - iOye, qu6 b~irbaro!,/,no? Yo no le he oido a ese sefior.

'Listen, incredible, no? l ' v e never heard of this man.'
(6b) B - / , N o ? Es catedr~itico.
'No? [He]'s a professor.'
(6c) A - Bueno, es que ser~i de por la mafiana, Lno? a lo mejor.
'Well, it's that [he] will be (he is) from the morning, maybe, no?'
(6d) B - Sf.
'Yes.'
(6e) A - Yo es que antes era del ... del grupo de por la noche, Lsabes?
'I [it]'s that before [I] was from the ... from the evening group, [you] know?'

In (6a), A is using the SP to emphasize the fact that, given the university world in
which A and B are interacting, it is surprising (to A) that she has never heard of a
professor who was such an easy touch. In line (6e), A again uses the SP to contrast
the facts of her situation with what would normally be expected, to wit, that she was
not always a member of the morning group, though she is now, and that to assume
that she always had been a member of the morning group from the fact of her pre-
sent membership would not, in A's view, be an illogical conclusion to draw.
This use of SPs for purposes of contrasting real knowledge with expected knowl-
edge is consistent with a notion of a conversation taking place within a framework
of shared beliefs; it may even be possible, by using this model, to point out what
may be underlying assumptions about the world in which the conversants are living.
In (7a-b), a university student is offering one of her peers a cigarette, and the peer
declines:

(7a) A - i B a h ! /,Quieres?
'Bah! [Do you] want (one)?'
(7b) B - No, gracias, yo n o f u m o .
'No, thanks, I don't smoke.'

In (7b), B's use of the SP, which is not pragmatically or syntactically mandatory (the
utterance is felicitous without the SP), serves as a possible contrastive marker, high-
lighting the fact that, not only is B contrasting her non-smoker status with A's polite
assumption that she might be a smoker, but also that, in Madrid in the late
1970s-early 1980s, to be a nonsmoker, while not frowned upon, was perhaps worthy
of special attention (in University circles).
The analysis of how 'pragmatic weight' would account for emphatic and con-
trastive uses of the SP is relatively straightforward, and little imagination is neces-
sary to see how 'emphasized' subjects or 'contrastive' utterances are 'weightier', in
the sense of more personally relevant and more invested with emotion, than other
556 B. Davidson /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

types of utterances in a conversation. What is gained by the pragmatic weight analy-

sis is that it allows for an extension of 'contrast' and 'emphasis' to be naturally
extended from explicit claims that contrast to 'frames of belief' or personal reference
that may be in contrast. In (8a-e), a conversation between an unmarried female uni-
versity student and a female university student who is married with a child, what is
being expressed by the constant use of SPs is an invocation of the personal frame of
reference of each participant with respect to the other's lifestyle:

(8a) A - O sea, me lo pienso, si yo ... yo tuviera un hijo ... (V) ... iqu6 problemas!
estarfa atada, de verdad; o sea, es que ...
'Like, [I] think, if I ... I had a child ... (V) ... what problems ! [I] would be tied,
truly; like, [it]'s that ...
(8b) B - Bueno, eso 1o piensas, pero luego, cuando llega el momento, yo creo que
es un poco distinto, /,eh?
'Well, [you] think that, but later, when the moment arrives, 1 think that [it]'s a
little different, e h ? '
(8c) A - i P e o r ! ije, je!
'Worse! Ha, h a ! '
(8d) B - i N o ! , i q u 6 v a !
' N o ! , no w a y ! '
(8e) A - Peor. Yo pienso que es peor, /,eh?
'Worse. I think that [it]'s worse, eh?

The near constant use of SPs in (8a-e) is not the only clue that what is being con-
trasted is not simply explicit information but implicit assumptions about lifestyles;
there is A ' s stream of discourse markers (o sea, 'like'; es que, '[it]'s that) in (8a),
where she first expresses her significantly different views on childbearing, and of
course there is the content of the discussion itself. A and B have stated plainly what
they believe to be true; in (8f-h), A goes on to explain why she holds the views she
does, and therefore why B is wrong, and may some day even agree with her:

(8f) B - Yo cuando nos casamos y enseguida me quedg en estado, i bueno !, sufri un

trauma tremebundo.
'I when we married and immediately [I] became pregnant, well!, [I] suffered a
tremendous trauma.'
(8g) A - / , S f ?
'Yes?'
(8h) B - En cambio, ahora ya nada.
'In contrast, now nothing.'

In (8f-h), B tries to explain her frame of reference to A, and A begins to soften

her dogmatic approach to how she feels about having children. What is in evidence
in (8a-h), then, is first a contrast, and then an attempt to reconcile implicit frames of
belief that do not match, with the help of a large number of SPs. The participants in
the conversation, by using the SP, may be adding epistemic weight to their argu-
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 557

ments, something that is usually necessary only when the speaker believes that her
stated opinions are going to be met with skepticism.
It is also worth noting that a large number of the SPs used above are with the
verbs of beliefpensar and creer; as will be seen below, when appearing with an SP,
these verbs frequently lend themselves to a speech act interpretation of 'I claim' (see
section 3.3). While an argument could be made that a pragmatic weight analysis of
SP use in the examples above is just another name for a contrastive/emphatic analy-
sis, pragmatic weight as a concept is better able to deal with the multi-functionality
of some appearances of SPs. It is easy to see how an SP can be adding pragmatic
weight to an epistemic frame while at the same time adding pragmatic weight to a
possible speech-act verb, invoking the proper interpretation by the hearer, but it is
more difficult to see what 'contrastiveness' or 'emphasis' have to do, conceptually,
with speech acts.

3.2. Epistemic parentheticals

There are verbs which are prone to becoming 'bleached' of their truth-functional
content, and which develop more 'abstract' meanings, serving to give information
about how the speaker positions him- or herself in relation to their utterance; these
verbs have been classified, for English at least, as 'Epistemic Parentheticals'
(Thompson and Mulac, 1991). The types of verbs that are most prone to this type of
grammaticalization are verbs of knowing and verbs of seeing or watching, among
other classes of verbs. Some of the features of these grammaticalized verb forms is
that they appear frequently in conversation, more frequently than their ungrammati-
calized counterparts, and that they appear in lexically 'frozen' collocations and are
frequently phonologically reduced (i.e., 'I dunno' or ' Y ' k n o w ? ' in English). These
verbs may be in the process of becoming lexicalized; whatever their grammatical
status, semantically they differ from other uses of the same verb in that they have
moved from having meaning in the socio-physical world, to having meaning in the
world of speaker's beliefs, s
In the corpus I have looked at, certain verbs stand out from the other verbs in the
transcripts in that they tend to appear repeatedly in certain conjugated forms, and in
that they appear overall much more frequently than other verbs; these verbs are typ-
ical candidates for becoming Epistemic Parentheticals, and indeed are being used in
identical ways to those laid out by Thompson and Mulac (1991). Table 3 shows the
number and form of appearance of the verbs saber, 'to know', decir, 'to say', and
fijarse, 'to pay attention to'. The table shows whether or not the verb appeared with
an SP (a verb which was preceded or followed anywhere in the sentence by an SP
with which it agreed in person and number was said to appear with the SP), and
whether or not it appeared in a positive or negative statement. The contrast is
between, for example, sg, '[I] know', yo s~, 'I know', no s~, '[I] don't know', and yo
no s& 'I don't know'. Fijarse appears under a separate heading, because it appears

See Sweetser (1990) for an account of polysemy between semantic domains.

558 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

exclusively in the second person in the data, and because it is used most frequently
as an imperative.

Table 3
The appearance and conjugation of saber, 'to know', fijarse, 'to pay attention to', and decir, 'to say'

Verb Neg [-SP] Neg [+SP] Pos [-SP] Pos [+SP]

/ St. person
Saber 70 4 6 15 (n=95)
Decir 0 0 30 11 (n=41)
Fijarse 0 0 0 0 (n=0)

2nd. person
Saber 2 1 19 4 (n=26)
Decir 3 0 8 ! (n=12)

Imperative [-SP] Imperative [+SP] Declarative [-SP]

Fijarse 12 4 1 (n=17)
ffjate (70.6%) ffjate tfi te fijas

The verb decir, which is analyzed in this paper as a potential speech act verb, will
be looked at more closely in section 3.3; this section, which deals with Epistemic
Parentheticals, will be devoted to explaining how saber and fijarse frequently mean
different things when produced with or without an SP, and how an analysis that uti-
lizes the concept of pragmatic weight would explain these differences.
Example (9) shows how the verb saber is typically used as an Epistemic Paren-
thetical [EPAR]:

(9) Yo quiero nifio y ademfis por el marido; no s& le gusta m~s.

'I want a boy and also for (my) husband; [1] don't know, he likes it more (lit.
'to him it is more pleasing').'

There is no knowable thing that the speaker in (9) is claiming ignorance of;
rather, she is modifying her belief in, and thus her commitment to, the following
phrase le gusta mds. She knows her husband would prefer a boy, but what she is
not sure of is why this is so. This Epistemic use of no s~ is paralleled by the use
of the second person interrogative form gsabes?, which appears most regularly
in utterance-final position, again usually without a knowable proposition being
referred to, as in (10):

(10) Pero lo aprob6, lo aprob6 con un trabajo, i.sabes? Porque, no s& es que hay
mucha diferencia, yo creo, entre el ./~rabe de primero y el de segundo.
'But [I] passed it, [I] passed it with a project, [you] know? Because, [1] don't
know, [it]'s that there's a big difference, I believe, between first year Arabic
and second year.'
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 559

By comparing the two occurrences of saber in (10) with the occurrence of creer, 'to
believe, think', we can see the difference between the EPAR uses of the former and
the truth-functional uses of similar verbs of knowing such as the latter. The phrase
yo creo, 'I believe', is referring to a believable proposition, that is, that second-year
Arabic is much more difficult than first-year Arabic; this may also be a speech-act
use of creer to mean 'claim' rather than simply 'believe' (section 3.3). The two uses
of saber, however, are not referring to any knowable proposition, but rather are
being used meta-linguistically to show the speaker's commitment to the comprehen-
sion of the listener and the speaker's desire to signal that she knows what she is
about to say is her own opinion, rather than a fact.
There are, however, cases where saber occurs without the SP and maintains its
truth-functional meaning; in these cases there is usually an overt, morphosyntacti-
cally integrated object serving as what is (or is not) known, as in the very common
expression no lo s~, '[I] don't know it', or the phrase lo que no sabra, 'what [I] did-
n't know', from (11) below. But in cases where there is in fact no way of easily dis-
ambiguating if the speaker is invoking the truth-functional meaning or the EPAR
meaning of saber (that is, when the context of the utterance makes the reading of
saber ambiguous between holding over a knowable proposition, or over the entire
utterance), the SP is used to invoke the truth-functional meaning of the verb. In
(11 a-c), two people are talking about finding the phone number of a relative stranger:

(1 la) B - ... Seguro que no es Medinaceli, o es algo a s / y ...

'... Surely [it]'s not Medinaceli, or [it]'s something like that and ...'
(llb) A - Yo sf, yo sabra que ... (V) ... o sea (...) Medinaceli sf me son ... me son-
aba. Y y sabra que ... que existfa. Lo que no sabia tampoco era el ...
'1 yes, 1 k n e w that ... (V) ... well (...) Medinaceli yes soun ... sounded familiar
to me. What [1] didn't k n o w either was the ...'
( l l c ) B - N o s~, y o sabla que, que pillaba por aquf la cosa, pero no sabia que era
Medinaceli.
'[1] d o n ' t know, I k n e w that, that it was around there, but [I] didn't know that
[it] was Medinaceli.'

The utterance-initial no s~ in (1 lc) contrasts sharply with the other uses of saber in
this exchange. It appears without an SP or a morphosyntactic object, and there is no
knowable proposition that is being referred to; B is stating her insecurity about the
entire process of finding Medinaceli's phone number, and how she had gone about
finding it. This Epistemic use of the verb is juxtaposed against the truth-functional
uses quite clearly in (1 lc), where the EPAR is immediately followed by the speaker
claiming past knowledge of the approximation of a last name. B uses the SP to sig-
nal the non-epistemic reading of yo sabla in (1 lc); there was something she knew.
By using the SP to add pragmatic weight to the verb, she is signaling, in effect, a less
grammaticalized (or abstract) reading of a verb which has through usage acquired
several potential interpretations.
Like saber, the v e r b f i j a r s e , which is a reflexive verb, shows a strong bias towards
appearing in one specific configuration, f:jate, which literally means 'pay attention
560 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

to this', but which might also be translated as 'look', or 'listen', or 'check it out'. In
the data I looked at, the verb is only once conjugated in any form other than the
imperative second person familiar form (seen below in (13)), and, like saber, almost
never orders the listener to pay attention to any clear concept or physical object, as
in (12):

(12) A - No le entiendes ni siquiera las preguntas, ffjate, i Es horrible!

'[You] don't even understand his questions, check it out. [It]'s horrible!'

In (12), A is discussing a professor whose style is so opaque and convoluted that his
questions are impossible to understand, let alone his answers. Her use of the verb
form fijate is telling her interlocutor to pay attention, not merely to the idea that his
questions are difficult to understand, but what this implies. Again, the lack of an SP
gives rise to the non-truth functional, grammaticalized reading of the verb fijarse,
but only in the case of the nearly-fixed form of the verb fijate (the attachment of the
reflexive clitic in word-final position is obligatory in the imperative forms of Span-
ish). In the one case in the data I looked at in which the verb appears in a non-imper-
ative form, it is used truth-functionally, as can be seen in (13):

(13) B - Ya sa .... para saber que estamos equivocadas, si por ejemplo Morelos no
es, ahora te fijas, dices: 'Pues no es', pero .... /,entiendes ?
Already 'sa ...' [?], to know that we are wrong, if for example [it]'s not More-
los, now you look~pay attention to [it], [you] say: 'Well [that]'s not it', but ...
[you] know?

In this example the verb is being used 'truth-functionally', in the sense that there is
something quite literal the speaker is implying that ' y o u ' (meaning 'one') pay atten-
tion to, which is the spelling of a name.
There is a question of what the ffjate forms appearing with a postposed SP mean;
they are clearly not truth-functional, and yet the presence of the SP implies, under
the hypothesis of pragmatic weight, that they should be. I suggest that postposed SPs
act differently than do preposed ones, and that the 'principle of functional uncer-
tainty' applies only to those SPs that are in utterance-initial or second position. How-
ever, even if this is not the case, all of the postposed SPs that appeared in the data
appeared utterance-finally, and usually at the end of a speaker's turn; it could be said
that these SPs are turning over the floor to the speaker's interlocutor (see section
3.4), as can be seen in (17c) below. As there were no tokens offijarse appearing
with an SP in any other form other thanffjate in the data I looked at, it must remain
a prediction that the appearance of this verb with the SP will correspond frequently
with a truth-functional reading of the verb.

3.3. Speech acts

The data from Table 3 shows that decir, like saber and fijarse, also appears most
frequently conjugated in one form for each person, but there is a significant variation
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 561

in the rate of appearance of the SP between the two forms. In the first person conju-
gations of decir, digo, 'I say', is the most common form. It appears with the SP con-
siderably less of the time than most other first person verbs in the transcript (16.8%
as compared with 29%); this is directly related to its use in most utterances as a
marker of reported speech, which is a function that carries very little semantic load.
In the second person the verb is most liable to appear as dices, 'you say', but it also
appears commonly as the negative no dices, 'you don't say'; saber almost never
appears with the SP when conjugated in the second person.
This difference in frequency of occurrence with the SP seems to be a function of
the first person use of the verb ' s a y ' with an SP to mean the speech act equivalent of
'claim', as in (14):

(14) Dando la clase - yo te lo digo - que es, es muy maja, muy agradable, y muy
simpfitica.
'Giving class - 1 say~claim to you - [it] is very nice (fern.), very pleasant, and
very friendly (fern).'

Thus, if the speaker wishes to perform the act of claiming a proposition to be true,
rather than simply preface what is being said by the inquit 'I said/say', the SP may
be used to add pragmatic weight to the bare VP and turn it into the performative
speech act 'I hereby say that X is true/is the case'. This type of speech-act use of the
verb with an SP is also true for verbs of belief, such as creer, 'to believe' (see (8b))
and pensar, 'to think' (see (8e)). The pragmatic weight added by the SP signals to
the listener that the correct interpretation of the verb is the semantically 'heavier' or
more assertive speech act form of the verb.

3.4. Turn taking

Another of the functions of the SP in discourse, most notably the X-Form SP (or
topicalized SP), is to signal a speaker's intention to take the floor for a full conver-
sational turn; that is, a speaker will preface an utterance with an SP if he or she
wants to claim the right to speak for an extended period of time. In the following
examples, speakers use the SP to express an interest in telling a story, for example,
or for prefacing a comment that is an opinion or that makes a claim, and is not
merely a backchannel.
Before analyzing the examples, it must be stated once again that it is difficult to
separate the different uses of the SP; an utterance-initial yo may be used simulta-
neously for contrastive effect, to signal a truth content meaning of a verb, and in an
attempt to take the floor, all in the same utterance. For example, in order to make
a successful contrastive claim about some proposition, it is also necessary to first
take the floor long enough for the other participants in the conversation to be able
to pay attention to what you are saying; the same SP may be used to perform both
of these tasks. What is relevant about the examples below is that they contain SPs
that seem to be functioning primarily as markers for signaling turn-taking inten-
tions; this does not imply that they are not simultaneously serving other pragmatic
562 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

functions in the discourse, something which the analysis of pragmatic SP weight

allows for.
In (15a-c), A and B are discussing what B will study when she finishes her fifth
year. B has just mentioned either geography or linguistics as possible choices (she
introduces history as a possible choice in (15b)), and in her preceding turn has used
7 first person verb forms without an SP:

(15a) A - Bueno, Geograffa sf es ... Geograffa es bonito. A mf me gusta.

'Well, yes, geography is ... geography is nice. I like it (lit. 'to me it is pleas-
ing')'
(15b) B - Geograffa o Historia, o algo asf.
'Geography or history, or something like that.'
(15c) A - Yo estaba pensando tambi6n en Historia, pero /,sabes lo que pasa? ...
'1 was thinking of history also, but, you know what? ...'

In line (15a), A is agreeing, tepidly, that geography is potentially interesting. How-

ever, B's mention of history in (15b) allows A to then make a connection to her own
experience in line (15c), and for this reason she signals a refocusing of the conver-
sation on her own interest in history, beginning with an SP. A goes on to tell the very
long story (14 lines of transcription) of why she is no longer interested in the subject
(she had a terrible professor) with no transcribed interruptions or backchannels
whatsoever from B. When A ends her turn with the EPAR 'ffjate', B responds with
an academic horror story of her own, signaling her intention to take and keep the
floor with a plural SP (this example is identical to (13) above; it is the conclusion
of the turn started by A in example (15c)):

(15c") A - No le entiendes ni siquiera las preguntas, ffjate, iEs horrible!

'[You] don't even understand his questions, check it out. [It]'s horrible!'
(15d) B - Nosotros tambi6n el afio pasado tuvimos uno en Historia que nada, ino
cogfamos el libro!
'We also had one last year in history who nothing, [we] didn't use the b o o k ! '

In these examples, the SP is being used to signal the speaker's intent to take a full
turn in the conversation, in which she may relate a narrative, or give a complete
account of her own opinions, ideas, or feelings towards a topic. The SP lets the
hearer know that what is coming is an attempt to take the floor; this attempt is not
always successful, as can be seen in (16a-c) below. A has stated that she must still
pass a number of courses, and B has replied that she too has yet to complete Arabic:

(16a) Inf A - /,El Arabe? Yo el Arabe lo aprob~ con 6ste, con P.

'Arabic? 1 passed Arabic with this [person], with P. (name).'
(16b) Inf B - Con P. Yo es que tuve un profesor ...
'With P. I it's that [I] had a professor ...'
(16c) A - Pero lo aprob6, lo aprob6 con un trabajo, /,sabes? Porque ...
'But [I] passed it, [I] passed it with a " w o r k " [project, paper], [you] know?
Because ...'
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 563

B's attempt to tell a story is not successful, and she must wait through the rest of
(16c), in which A lays out the orientation and conflict of her story. At the first break
in A ' s narrative, however, B decides she will again try to tell her story. She signals
once more her intentions to take the floor with an SP in line (16d), and this time she
is successful, even though A has not concluded her story:

(16d) B - Pues nosotros tuvimos una clase que es, es, era es con el D ...
Well we had a class that is, is, was is with D ...'

B then keeps the floor, and tells her own (rather long) story with only one sentence-
length backchannel from A.
We can see from the examples above that SPs may be used meta-linguistically by
speakers to negotiate turn-taking within the conversation. Thus they are used not
only to emphasize or contrast subjects, or to disambiguate semantic meanings, but
also pragmatically, and their use will be determined in part by these pragmatic func-
tions.

3.5. Narrative continuity

The last factor that seems to influence the appearance of SPs in conversation that
will be looked at in this paper is what I will call 'narrative continuity'. 9 This occurs
when one SP is followed closely by several other SPs, as is frequently the case in
conversational data. There will be long stretches of talk with no SPs used, and then
there will be a string of SPs coming all together; this can be seen in many of the con-
versational examples examined above.
It may be that what is frequently happening in these cases is what is happening in
(16a~t), that is, that speakers are using the SP constantly because they are all trying
to gain the floor at the same time. Another possible reason for this type of clustering
of SPs may be seen as part of the frame analysis of contrastiveness; if a speaker says
something that is considered out of the ordinary in the shared world of the conver-
sational participants, it is possible that subsequent speakers will continue to focus
attention on the contrastive information, as in (17a-e). A and B have already negoti-
ated a number of turns successfully: B offers a cigarette to A; A accepts; B asks
about A ' s pregnancy; A responds; the two discuss the taping assignment they have
to do. All of this is performed without a single SP. When A changes the topic from
idle talk about passing the present course to the unexpected news that she failed one
of her courses last year, however, she uses the SP to contrastive effect:

(17a) A - A v e r si por lo menos nos aprueban, de 6sta ...

'Let's see if at least [they] pass us, from this ...'
(17b) B - iHuy!
'Yeah!'

'Triggering' is perhaps a more adequate label for this phenomenon, as one explanation for these SPs
could be that the use of an SP may 'trigger' a temporary increase in the number of SPs used.
564 B. Davidson /.lournal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565

(17c) A - Yo me quiero examinar en febrero, ffjate t~.

'1 want to be examined in February, listen you.'
(17d) B - +Te quieres examinar? Pero t{~ repites?
'[You] want (yourself) to be examined? But you are repeating (the class)?'
(17e) A - Sf, porque es que tengo ... Sf, yo ya repito ....
'Yes, because [it]'s that [I] have ... Yes, 1 already am repeating ...'

After completing 14 exchanges without an SP, A and B proceed to use 4 SPs in

three exchanges, a rather dramatic change. A's use of the SP yo in (17c) is mirrored
in B's use of the SP tfi in (17d); B is reinforcing A's seemingly implicit assumption
that her having to repeat a course is in some way not to be expected. In this way, a
frame of reference may be serving to reinforce the use of contrastive SPs; it may
also be that the SP is being used to keep the subject of the discussion clearly in
focus, and for this reason I have chosen to tentatively call this use of the SP 'narra-
tive continuity'. This might also help explain why A chooses to use the SP again in
(17e); more problematic is the use of the SP tfi after the EPAR ffjate in (17c). It
would not have been infelicitous, in context, for A to have used the bare imperative
in this case (although without the SP, the intonation contour would be changed, and
a secondary stress would be placed on the cliticized reflexive pronoun -te; the SP
could be preposed, but rarely is with fijarse). As the meta-linguistic uses of the SP
have been shown in section 3.4, an analysis which incorporates pragmatic weight
allows us to hypothesize that in this instance the speaker is handing over the floor,
temporarily, to her interlocutor; however, to claim that the SP in (17c) is proof that
the SP is used meta-linguistically would be circular, and so the claim that follows
from a pragmatic weight analysis of SP use (that the SP is being used to hand over
the floor) must remain, in this instance, a claim.

4. Predictions

In this paper I have made a number of claims about the pragmatic and discourse
uses of the SP in Spanish conversation. However, there are a number of functions
that I only briefly touched upon, or which were not present in any great numbers
in the data I looked at; further study will be necessary to see if the truth-func-
tional and speech-act analyses of SP appearance in Spanish are adequate. More
generally, the notion of 'frame contrast', combined with the larger notion of
'pragmatic weight', could be used in studies of discourse analysis, both to analyze
where speakers are committing themselves most fully to the positions they are
taking (cf. Teun van Dijk's (1993) model of critical discourse analysis), and also
to further develop theories of 'topic'. And, finally, more than the individual tax-
onomies of the pragmatic uses of SPs in spoken Spanish, the notion of 'pragmatic
weight' could prove to be useful for further studies of pronoun appearance in
other pro-drop languages, allowing for a generalized theory of SP usage without
ignoring the individual differences between all of the Romance languages; in this
sense, the term 'pragmatic weight' could prove useful in capturing generalizations
 B. Davidson / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 543-565 565

about optional-pronoun usage that theories of 'emphasis' and 'contrastiveness'

cannot.

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