Syntactic variation and communicative style

Language Sciences 33 (2011) 138–153

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Language Sciences

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Syntactic variation and communicative style

María José Serrano a,⇑, Miguel Ángel Aijón Oliva b,1

a Departamento de Filología Española, Universidad de La Laguna, Campus de Guajara s/n, 38071 Tenerife, Spainb Departamento de Lengua Española, Universidad de Salamanca, Plaza de Anaya, 1, 37008 Salamanca, Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 4 May 2010Received in revised form 3 August 2010Accepted 19 August 2010

Keywords:Syntactic variationMeaningStyleSocial interactionCognitionCommunication

0388-0001/$ - see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltddoi:10.1016/j.langsci.2010.08.008

⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 922 317679; faE-mail addresses: [email protected] (M.J. Serrano)

1 Tel.: +34 923 294445; fax: +34 923 294586.

a b s t r a c t

Advances in the study of morphosyntactic variation make it possible to move beyond theview of variants as merely formal alternatives conveying a single meaning and covaryingwith social features and formality of the situation. Alternating grammatical structuresalways entail certain communicative differences at the discursive-pragmatic and cognitivelevels, and speakers can deploy their formal choices as stylistic resources. In this paper wewill outline some basic tenets for a comprehensive theoretical approach to variation, start-ing from a concept of style as the construction of meaning in interaction. We will surveysome cases of syntactic variation in Spanish, showing how the approach proposed can helpexplain their existence within the system by taking their communicative and perceptualfoundations into account.

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1. The sociolinguistic concept of style

1.1. Style and sociolinguistic structure

Style can be seen as the third component of sociolinguistic variation, aside from the linguistic and the social (Rickford andEckert, 2001, p. 1). It is also the less homogeneous one, encompassing variation within the speaker as an individual and not(just) as a member of a speech community and/or social group. Stylistic variation is considered basic, though not exclusivelyindividual in nature, and comprises the range of expressive possibilities whereby a speaker or group of speakers manage alltheir linguistic activities. One of the best possible definitions of style, notwithstanding its apparent vagueness, might well bethe one put forward by Coupland: ‘Style refers to a way of doing something’ (2007: p. 1). However, in most cases it has beenanalyzed only with regard to intraspeaker variation as well as to somewhat diffuse notions like those of prestige or formality,specially within variationist sociolinguistics.

Although it has often been pointed out that research on the field of style could be the key to the development of an inte-grated theoretical model of language, encompassing system and usage as well as the different kinds of synchronic variation(Cheshire, 1987; Biber, 1994; Rickford, 2001, p. 231), such a goal is still far from being achieved. In fact, style is generallyregarded as a secondary matter in variationist investigations (cf. Chambers, 2005, p. 6). As is known, it has traditionally beenunderstood as a consequence of the degree of linguistic awareness speakers have in a given situation, and of their ability tocontrol the variants they (supposedly) have at their disposal (Labov, 1966, 1972, 2001). In Labov’s view, style is largely sub-ordinate to social differences in talk, that is, social stratification is considered wider than the stylistic one and comprising it,so there can be said to exist a whole stylistic range within each social category (cf. also Bell, 2001,p. 145).

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M.J. Serrano, M.Á. Aijón Oliva / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 138–153 139

This means that different social groups tend to correlate their linguistic usages to the styles associated to them, so socialstratification may be parallel to those styles disposed along the axis of formality–informality (Labov, 2001, p. 86). As Coup-land (2007, pp. 38–39)) correctly points out, the supposition that all speakers in a given social group will exhibit similar styleshifts in the same contexts reveals a clearly behaviorist orientation – especially if it is to imply that speakers cannot movebeyond the stylistic limits defined by their social ascription. In this sense, style would have to be understood simply as theactualization in discourse of the linguistic variants characterizing a social group.

Anyway, most studies carried out so far have indeed suggested the existence of an intersection between social and sty-listic variation. Each social group is supposed to have at its disposal a given range of stylistic variation that may partly over-lap with those of neighboring groups. An important theoretical question is that concerning the nature and origin of thisintersection, which has been tackled in different ways.

A first hypothesis is that patterns of stylistic variation mirror those of the social (Bell, 1984, 2001), meaning stylistic var-iation is contained within the limits of social variation and is smaller than it. This is the position held by the audience designapproach, according to which style largely consists of imitating the talk of the social group which the hearer supposedly be-longs to or which he/she wishes to identify with. In successive reformulations of his model, Bell has come to admit that thecreative or initiative dimension of style, at first considered unimportant, can be at least as relevant as the responsive one, andthat an explanatory theory of style should encompass both.

The influence of other situational aspects, such as setting or topic, would be due to the typical association of these withcertain kinds of audiences. When no attempt to accommodate is found, but rather to diverge linguistically from the hearer, itcan be explained as referee design, whereby the speaker seeks to associate him/herself to a different social group. Bell’s ap-proach assumes that speakers will tend to reduce social distance by sharing linguistic variants and varieties. People are con-sidered to have the ability to converge in many discursive aspects (cf. Mesthrie et al., 2003, p. 151) because linguisticaccomodation is and/or is generally perceived as profitable for the speaker as well as for the hearer (Coupland, 1984).2

But there is also the opposite view, suggesting that patterns of social variation in a community are a reflection of the sit-uational or stylistic ones. This has been defended mainly by Finegan and Biber (1994, 2001) and summarized in a registeraxiom according to which linguistic differences between social groups result from the fact that members of any given groupdo not take part as frequently in all kinds of interactions, but are more experienced and proficient in some than others. In thelong run, the traits typical of such interactions will be incorporated to their social dialects. Since it is generally assumed thatthe higher the sociocultural level, the greater the skill in written styles or registers, those functional features most usual inwritten language should become associated to socially privileged groups. Therefore this model proposes that all linguistictraits and frequencies usually attributed to group ascription of any kind (social class, gender, age, etc.) may in fact derivefrom situational variation.

However, both proposals may reveal an excessively structural orientation in their neat distinction of different types ofvariation, as well as in their search for some one-way cause-effect relationship between them. Linguistic style constitutesa complex set of culturally established ways of speaking that are closely linked to other cultural dimensions. This makesit possible for speakers to employ stylistic variation as a repertoire to set up presuppositions and inferences of various kinds.Along these lines, Coupland’s approach (2001) assumes that it is (geographical or social) dialect variation that enables theexistence of different styles or ways of talking. The specific traits of any variety are perfectly fit to articulate the social iden-tity of the speaker and his/her communicative goals, since a link exists between variants and social meanings that are al-ready culturally indexed (2001, p. 190). This should mean that speaking in a dialect or variety is in fact to speak throughit (2001, p. 204). Linguistic dialects or varieties are thus social styles and will be used as means to depict social identity froma cognitive point of view in which linguistic usage creates the communicative situation. However, it will be necessary to elu-cidate how speakers use or execute social styles as ranges of communicatively symbolic possibilities (Coupland 2007, 2, 3).One of the main contributions of this author to a theory of style is his overcoming of traditional restrictive concepts such asthose of speech community and dialect, as well as his refusal to submit the stylistic order to the social one as has been done byother approaches. This opens a path towards less structural and more interactional views of style.

1.2. Style and interaction

It is easy to perceive a theoretical opposition between behaviorist and creative approaches to style, as well as to the lin-guistic variability on which style is built (Bell, 1999). Some authors tend to see linguistic style as an automatic response tothe interactional norms of a situation; others emphasize speaker agency and the ability to redefine the situation by means ofcreative linguistic choices. This contrast between reactive views (which have proved to be theoretically insufficient) and themore recent initiative ones should not lead to radical positions; there is in fact the possibility that both kinds of approachesare not incompatible (cf. Aijón Oliva, 2008, p. 17). The results of sociolinguistic inquiry suggest that the different communi-cative scenarios within a social milieu will allow for different degrees of stylistic freedom. A speaker can choose to contra-vene the norms of a situation, but the results of doing so may not always be socially or personally rewarding. Thus all stylisticactivity could be seen as resulting from the tension between what is promoted by some communicative situation (and the

2 In fact, Bell’s model shares a behaviorist orientation with Labov’s, since speakers are supposed to react more or less automatically to their audience. Thisreactive facet of style shifting has indeed been confirmed by many empirical studies (cf. Schilling-Estes, 2004, p. 384).

140 M.J. Serrano, M.Á. Aijón Oliva / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 138–153

broader social context within which it occurs) vs. the particular goals of the speaker as a rational being with wishes andneeds of his/her own.

From current sociolinguistic approaches style can be inferred to be a mediating element between linguistic variation andthe social practices that help characterize the self and others: discourse and variation jointly constitute the basis for the con-struction of linguistic styles. Social identity is linked to socio-communicative practices, and it is these that must be analyzed,whether stylistic variation is associated to a group or to an individual. When styles are put in relation to such sociolinguisticpractices, the fundamental question that needs to be answered is ‘‘how social meaning gets constructed in linguistic varia-tion” (Eckert, 2001, p. 124). In this sense, a style can be defined as a set of linguistic resources that are identifiable in socialpractice; linguistic variables, and especially syntactic ones, are sociostylistically meaningful due to their role in the shapingof personal and group styles (Eckert, 2004, p. 43; Auer, 2007).3 If we accept that the study of style must go far beyond theattention-to-speech model, then not just structural social aspects, but also interactional, ethnographic-anthropological, psycho-social and cognitive ones will have to be incorporated (cf. Selting, 2009; Ciliberti, 1993, p. 166). Human communication is amatter of constructing and sharing meaning, however meaning is understood.

One of the major hindrances for variationism towards the development of a theory of its own has been the suppositionthat the appearance of some variant in some context is the outcome of an independent factor or a combination of them. Sta-tistical methodology itself favors such a perception. Even if it seems reasonable to think that a formal choice might be theconsequence of pre-existing conditions in some cases, in others it could just as well constitute the cause of such conditions,or just co-occur with them in order to achieve some communicative goal. All elements in a situation may simultaneouslycontribute to the creation of meanings. This is exactly what the abovementioned initiative approaches to style are about(cf. also Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai, 2001).

It is also obvious that, save for special cases, no single linguistic choice will have the power to define a style in itself. Ervin-Tripp (1972, p. 233) already pointed out the necessity of going beyond the analysis of isolated elements and observing theirpatterns of co-occurrence. In the domain of corpus linguistics, Biber (1995) and Biber et al. (2006) propose a multi-dimen-sional approach in which such patterns come to be the grounds on which the existence of a register continuum can be cer-tified. Whether the stylistic traits of a social group are isolated or individual styles are described as means to shape socialidentities, style should be conceived of as a way of representing and communicating reality, as well as of fulfilling the inten-tion of the speaker to assimilate or to distance him/herself from others (cf. Duranti, 2000; Schilling-Estes, 2004, pp. 389–390).

Therefore we will propose an approach in which linguistic variation is inextricably linked to communicative factors(Schiffrin, 1984) and linguistic style is regarded as a process of construction of meaning in interaction. This goes in line withthe current tendency to revise the behavioristic orientation that has traditionally dominated variationist sociolinguistics (cf.Aijón Oliva, 2006a, p. 693) and to complement such an approach with qualitative, interactional considerations.4

1.3. Style and syntax

The ideas that there exists variation at the morphosyntactic level and that it plays a crucial role in the configuration ofcommunicative styles are not new. They can be found all across the works by Lavandera (1978, 1984) already in the firstdecades of Labovian variationism and as a consequence of extending to morphosyntax the methodology that had proved suc-cessful at the phonological level.5 It is neither possible nor desirable to understand grammar without taking discourse andcommunication into account. Lavandera’s contribution is an important one to the study of syntactic variation, since her findingsand observations make it possible to suspect that the distribution of differences in meaning, not just in form, is socially condi-tioned and that different social groups will tend to exchange particular kinds of messages (1984, p. 14).

In fact, if one form is very frequent in contexts sharing certain semantic traits, that form will end up by incorporating suchtraits to its meaning; hence variationist sociolinguistic research on syntax should incorporate the study of the distribution oflinguistic meanings (1984, p. 24, 34). Formal alternances apparently embodying the same communicative sense may be di-vided into two groups: those contrasting stylistically, such as verbal tenses in conditional sentences (Si lo había sabido vs. Silo hubiera sabido ‘If I had known’), and those variants whose formal differences are invested with social and situational sig-nificance by way of their usage in particular contexts of communication. An example of the latter would be the use of theindicative when conveying higher logical probability (Si tengo tiempo, voy a la peluquería ‘If I have time, I’ll go to the hair-dresser’s’), as opposed to the subjunctive and the conditional when there is a lesser likelihood for the hypothesis to be ful-filled (Si tuviera tiempo, iría a la peluquería ‘If I had time, I would go to the hairdresser’s’) (Serrano, 1994, pp. 120–121).

Building partly on such a contribution, here we will posit the idea that the particular meanings associated to grammaticalvariants help shape communicative styles in discourse, and that this is ultimately due to the cognitive properties of gram-mar. We take the starting point that syntactic variants materialize non-equivalent meanings and that these are distributed

3 Social identity can and should be analyzed with regard to anthropological and ethnographic values. Studying style from the perspective of speaker designimplies resourcing to the ethnographic level at which individual and group stylistic meanings will be best understood (Schilling-Estes, 2004, p. 393; Coupland,2007, p. 26).

4 Such an orientation had already been suggested in order to improve research on syntactic variation (Serrano, 2006, p. 3).5 This extension engendered a long controversy on the suitability of the variationist method to study non-phonological phenomena (cf. Serrano, 2010), which

we hope will be regarded as irrelevant when the principles exposed here are taken into account.


across social continua in heterogeneous ways. Several authors have already suggested that different social groups may havetheir own communicative styles, just as speakers of different languages use distinct linguistic forms to convey their experi-ence of reality (cf. Eckert, 2000; Cheshire, 2005; Milroy and Gordon, 2003; Romaine, 2000). Of course, stylistic variabilityacross groups will generally be of a quantitative nature, based on distinct communicative preferences rather than on clearcutdifferences. This is why quantification and statistical analysis remain useful even if qualitative observation and interpreta-tion are paramount.

Thus our proposal does not deny the existence of correlations between linguistic variables and social or situational fea-tures, but aims to interpret them in quite a different light. Choosing some variant in interaction entails choosing to commu-nicate what that variant means, so it is not just forms that are distributed unequally across social groups, but meaningfulchoices as well. In this view, it should be emphasized that each syntactic form can contribute particular social and situationalvalues to discourse, resulting in stylistic meanings that should be the real object under analysis in any case of variability.

2. On the cognitive foundations of communicative styles

2.1. Variation, meaning and cognition

From the preceding discussion it should be inferred that any further development of variationist research on morphosyn-tax will require approaching grammar from an eminently semantic perspective. This will mean setting aside the traditionalrequirement of descriptive or referential sameness and viewing differences in meaning as the way to explain the existence offormal variation (Aijón Oliva, 2006a,b; Serrano, 2010, 2011). For this reason, we see current cognitivist approaches to gram-mar as offering the most fruitful path to the development of a theory of variation.6

First, it must be acknowledged that even though all sociolinguistic approaches are centered on the role of the speaker asuser, little is yet known about the real motivations leading speakers to select certain variants instead of other possible ones.The relationship between speaker and usage has been poorly investigated, due to the predominance of behavioristic views(see Section 1.2): speakers are supposed to linguistically act according to their social status and to the communicative sit-uation. In particular, variationism has tended to study closed and purportedly homogeneous categories of individuals whowill predictably show different frequencies with respect to the same variable. There is no explanation on why the linguisticsystem should allow and even perpetuate the uneconomic existence of several options to (supposedly) convey the samemeaning, let alone on why certain types of interactions and certain sociodemographic traits of speakers seem to triggerthe use of some linguistic forms instead of others. However, the findings of recent studies are paving the way towards atheoretical model of variation in natural languages in which style is understood as a process of meaning construction(cf. Serrano, 2010). There has no doubt been an important evolution from the earlier insistence on variant descriptivesynonymy through the incorporation of discursive and pragmatic considerations and the interactional perspective. Butthe support of a general linguistic theory to explain findings on variation is still needed. This can be accomplished thanksto the development of the cognitive paradigm (cf. also Serrano, 2011).

Cognitive linguistics is partly a return to the view of language as meaning and communication, and explicitly rejects for-malism and modularism. It is based on principles such as that language cannot be detached from the whole set of humanmental activities and that linguistic form is indissolubly linked to content (cf. Langacker, 1991, 1999; Gibbs, 1996, p. 31;Croft and Cruse, 2008, pp. 18–20). The fundamental symbolic nature of language grants meaning a central place in linguisticresearch, with grammar being a set of symbolic units for the expression of ideas in linguistic form (Cuenca and Hilferty, 1999,p. 185). This makes it possible to approach variation as an inextricable blend of grammatical and semantic-pragmatic ele-ments, starting from Langacker’s (1987) view of grammar as a continuum of symbols organizing conceptual content.

From this viewpoint, linguistic variation will be deemed as reflecting and at the same time shaping an extralinguistic real-ity that is perceived as variable, diffuse and ever-changing; forms in alternation will never have exactly the same meaning,even if they might seem to in a superficial semantic analysis. In this sense, variation would embody the mental categoriza-tion of human experience. The expressive choices made by speakers are hardly random, nor do they have merely psychoso-cial implications, but rather entail a particular way of configuring reality through discourse.

Thus a scientific explanation for variation should build on general principles of human cognition and of the way it devel-ops through interaction with the physical environment and with other members of the species (cf. Aijón Oliva and Serrano,2010). Furthermore, since variation is ubiquitous in those contexts where language is acquired, it can be hypothesized thatlinguistic and communicative competence might incorporate a fundamental probabilistic component (Bresnan and Hay,2008), but this is one of a number of complex questions that will only be ascertained through extensive research.

On the path to an explanation of grammatical variability and usage in Spanish we have found some perceptual notions tobe particularly useful, namely those of salience and informativity of discursive entities. These seem to be gradual rather thandiscrete notions measuring the relative relevance achieved by referents in any stretch of discourse (Beaugrande, 1980,

6 However, the line of research outlined here is not analogous to that of so-called cognitive sociolinguistics. The hermeneutic process followed by the latterstarts from notional or conceptual cognitive categories and observes their social arrangement, whereas our aim is to validate empirically observed syntactic andsociostylistic variation by taking cognitive grammar as its explanatory basis.


chapter IV, Fillmore, 1977, p. 75; Grimes, 1975, p. 281). Some elements are more salient for the participants, that is, they aremore firmly anchored and activated in their shared cognitive context, while others are introduced as relatively newinformation or are just confined to the perceptual background. All this seems to be tightly related to a great variety of formalfeatures of discourse. As will be shown in the following sections, these concepts have so far been successfully applied to theanalysis of a number of Spanish variable syntactic phenomena.

In sum, such an approach to discourse and cognition can endow the study of variation with an internal explanatory basisthat will make it possible to understand its functioning and, especially, the complex and subtle meaning effects that may beachieved by selecting a given form instead of others (cf. Talmy, 2000). Semantics, just as pragmatics, is a fundamental com-ponent of grammar, which again points to the adequacy of cognitive hermeneutic approaches for analyzing linguistic vari-ation. The integration of all levels of language across general mental principles will result in a vision of all so-called internaland external correlations as ultimately related and globally explainable by resorting to such principles.

2.2. State of the art. The present contribution

The rapprochement between cognitive and communication linguistics has become obvious in recent times throughthe incorporation of fieldwork and empirical data to some formal studies. Such a confluence of perspectives was expect-able, since cognitivism shares many basic interests with sociolinguistics and the study of variation (Dirven, 2005, p. 39).In fact, many authors have seen their junction as inevitable (cf. Kristiansen and Dirven, 2008, p. 2). As early as in 1999,Langacker pointed out the need to extend the cognitive approach to the field of discourse. Since this paradigm is basedon the analysis of meaning and use, it should naturally broaden its analytical scope to all areas of human communica-tion where meaning plays a relevant role (Kristiansen et al., 2006, p. 3). A view of linguistic structures as representingcognitive models, based on the conceptualization of physical experience and of the relationship with others, can helpexplain not only those structures but also their usage, traditionally seen as little more than a succession of empiricaldata. Such a junction of perspectives and tools is probably the greatest current challenge for both cognitivism and vari-ationist linguistics.

Recent studies on syntactic variation from a cognitive viewpoint are those dealing with the use of the Dutch adverb er‘there’ (Grondelaers et al., 2008), adjective variation in two varieties of the same language (Speelman et al., 2008) and par-ticle movement (Gries, 2001). As regards stylistic variation proper, we could cite Kristiansen’s (2008) study on style shiftingand accent perception from a sociocognitive perspective. The theoretical tenets of cognitive linguistics may well be appliedto syntactic and stylistic variation in Spanish as they have to other languages, and it is through such an approach that weintend to provide the study of variation with some explanatory ground, establishing a link between formal and functionalaspects that are most often regarded independently. The major challenge for future research will be to shape a theoreticalmodel that can reconcile all levels affected by variation (formal, semantic-pragmatic, discursive, sociostylistic) on the basisof the general mechanisms of human cognition (cf. Aijón Oliva and Serrano, 2010). All this favors an integrated sociolinguis-tic approach that in no case will contemplate the social and linguistic dimensions separately (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz,2007).

To illustrate some empirical projections of the theoretical principles exposed, in the remainder of this paper we will sur-vey a number of cases of syntactic variation in Spanish and some of the stylistic values that can be inferred from their anal-ysis. As remarked before, in order to explain such values we will tentatively resort to the cognitive notion of salience,understood as the perceptual relevance an entity achieves in a scene or event described by means of language (Croft andCruse (2008, p. 73)), as well as to the informativity referents are loaded with (Lambrecht, 1994, p. 273). Discourse is unde-tachable from the physical and psychological context in which it is produced, and it tends to reflect the relative importanceaccorded to participants and any other entities. It seems that salience can project itself on any level of linguistic structure,from the most external (the pragmatic-discursive) to the most internal ones (the phonological-prosodic). Here we intend toshow and discuss a few of its many repercussions on morphosyntactic variation.7

3. Some examples from Spanish

3.1. Variation in verbal clitics

Starting from Finegan and Biber’s (2001) approach to style as an effect of the functional communicative demands of thesituation, it has been possible to confirm the relevance of stylistic factors on morphosyntactic variation, and specifically inthe paradigm of Spanish verbal clitics as used in mass media language. Aijón Oliva (2006a, p. 671, 2006b) assumes that it is

7 The excerpts and data for the analyses have been taken from the following corpora: Corpus of Mass Media Language of Salamanca (MEDIASA) (Aijón Oliva,2006a); Conversation Corpus of Canary Islands Spanish (CCEC); and C-Oral-Rom (Moreno Sandoval, 2005). The first one comprises both radio and written presstexts from a Spanish central town: the domain of mass communication proves very useful for sociostylistic analyses of this kind, offering a wide range ofinteractions among different kinds of speakers. The second one is a corpus of both conversational and mass-media oral texts from Canarian speakers. Finally, C-Oral-Rom is an oral public corpus based on conversations among different speakers from Madrid.


not only the frequency of a formal variant that varies according to the situation, but also that of the internal and externalfactors that tend to co-occur with it. However, the notion of functionality handled by Finegan and Biber appears to applymostly to mechanical features of the communicative situation conditioning formal aspects of variation, such as lexical diver-sity or syntagmatic complexity. On the other hand, the possible discursive and cognitive values of variation seem to be ex-cluded from the quantitative analysis. Aijón Oliva believes that such values, far from hindering the analysis of formalvariability, may indeed be the key to its interpretation since (as assumed by the cognitive approach; see Section 2.2. above)any change in form entails a change in meaning.

In these studies, clitics are viewed as morphemes signaling object agreement, this being a relatively original feature ofSpanish among Romance languages. Such agreement is generally optional for non-pronominal indirect objects postposedto the verb:

1.
Yo (le)i entregué los documentos al secretarioi
‘I gave (him)i the documents to the secretaryi’

Variable agreement does not alter the descriptive content of the clause and is thus suitable for variationist analysis, even
if both variants do not seem to convey exactly the same at the discursive and cognitive levels. Aijón Oliva isolates the maininternal conditions co-occurring with the presence vs. absence of the clitic, as well as observing the relative frequencies ofthe variants according to social groups and textual genres. In general terms, non-agreement can be said to be most typical ofhigher social levels and written, informational genres. The author notices an almost stereotypical preference for non-agree-ment in news headlines, which he suggests may have been originally due to the necessity of saving page space, but in thelong run has come to characterize all journalistic informational discourse, even when there is no such necessity (2006a, p.683). This would support Finegan and Biber’s hypothesis that functionally motivated linguistic traits end up by acquiringsocial meanings as they become associated to the groups that use them more often, so social variation could be said to derivefrom situational variation.
Moreover, the author also finds some interesting facts from an interactional viewpoint. There seems to be a higher fre-quency of non-agreement in contexts where the person or people referred to by the indirect object are being criticized orlooked down on, while the opposite applies to contexts where such referents are portrayed in a positive way. This suggeststhat variable object agreement in Spanish could constitute a resource for (im)politeness.

2.
Con todo respeto Ø pido a los periodistas que toquen temas de su especialidad o que conocen en profundidad y no semetan en camisas de once varas. <Car-Ad-170504-6>‘With all due respect, I ask Ø journalists to stick to topics of which they have sufficient knowledge, instead of seekingtrouble’
3.
Juan por ejemplo Ø recrimina al alcalde/que::-/que en fin/que:- que esté todo el día/e:/dice aquí ‘‘toCANdo lasnarices” con el asunto de-/del Archi:vo o de la Casa Lis <Var-SE-211204-13:55>‘For example, Juan blames Ø the Mayor for being all the time, he says, screwing around with affairs such as those ofthe Archive or the Casa Lis’
This is not meant to say that expression of the clitic would not have been possible in these examples, it obviously is; butthe quantitative and qualitative analysis of real texts shows a tendency for controversial contexts like these to prefer theforms signaling lesser salience. The potential for (im)politeness of each variant seems to stem from their differing interpre-tations. Clitics signal the importance granted to their referents in discourse and perception. Their presence marks a rise in theperceptual salience of their referents, as is shown by their much higher frequency when referring to human beings and todefinite and thematic entities (cf. Givón, 1976); in fact, they are categorical when the corresponding noun phrase is formu-lated as a personal pronoun. Thus salience proves to be the most useful concept to explain variation in the use of verbal clit-ics as much as its stylistic values (cf. Section 2; Aijón Oliva, 2006a). This would explain why speakers (intuitively) choose thisvariant more often in positive or flattering contexts, or when they intend to downplay a threat on the image of the referent(see Table 1). Whereas a traditional correlational approach would try to ascertain which of these different interactional andcognitive factors is responsible for the choice of non-agreement, we believe they may all be present and relevant at the sametime: they are all meanings created at different levels by a single choice of the speaker. It is also interesting to note thatpoliteness does not seem to be linked to stylistic formality, since the more usual variant in so-called formal and written sit-uations (non-agreement) is at the same time the one generally used to signal confrontation or social distance.

Table 1Relationship between variable object agreement and interactional strategies.

Strategy Agreement Non-agreement Total

Dignification 59 (53.2%) 52 (46.8%) 111 (73.5%)Pejoration 16 (40%) 24 (60%) 40 (26.5%)


Most of what has been said is applicable to other phenomena related to Spanish clitics, such as the choice between accu-sative and dative forms to mark the agreement of a direct object (4) or the choice between preposition (or climbing) and post-position of clitics when they are adjoined to verbal periphrases (5).

8

9

4.

In factCf. Dow

Ayer (los/les) vi por la calle‘Yesterday I saw them (acc./dat.) on the street’

5.
Voy a matarte/Te voy a matar‘I (you) am going to kill (you)’
Dative forms and preposed clitics are the variants more typical of human and highly salient referents, and also seem to bethe ones preferred when trying to avoid interactional threats, whereas their counterparts suggest objectualization. As for thefirst of these phenomena, in (6) we can see an accusative clitic los (instead of the alternative les) used in a face-threateningcontext. On the other hand, in (7) the dative les is chosen to politely address the hearers of a radio program8:

6.
<EP> es demasiado buen actor/como para especializarse en este tipo de películas más comercia:les (...)<ASW> es verdad siempre: los: criticas un poco por esto <Var-SE-300503-19:40> (2006b, pp. 237–238)‘–He’s too good an actor to specialize in such commercial films... – That’s true, and you always criticize them (acc.)for that’
7.
Ya saben que todos los días tenemos la misma intención/informarles/si es posible al mismo tiempo entretenerles<Var-Co-230503-12:30> (2006a, p. 415)‘As you know, it is always our intention to inform you (dat.) and, if possible, to entertain you (dat.) at the same time’
As for clitic placement in periphrases, in example (5) above most speakers tend to perceive a stronger menace with post-position (Voy a matarte), whereas preposition is more likely to be interpreted as ironic or playful. Similarly, in (8) we see thatthe speaker, trying to avoid the suggestion that he might be intending to give his interlocutor any lessons, preposes the cliticreferring to the latter:

8.
Lo que yo pretendía decir don Alberto que no es cosa que le quiera esplicar porque la ha entendido ustéperfectamente/es que <Var-Co-230503-12:50> (2006b, p. 226)‘What I meant to say, Mr. Alberto – and it’s not that I (to you) intend to explain it, since I know you have perfectlyunderstood – is that. . .’
In the reviewed studies, the frequency of a variant in a given context is linked to a particular stylistic intention (be it so-cially indexed or not) and thus variability can be considered an interactional resource going beyond the mere numerical dis-tribution of variants. Such a conception of stylistic variation clearly overcomes traditional classifications along the formality/informality axis by encompassing several different dimensions and analytical levels. It supports the idea that linguistic var-iation, and more specifically non-phonological one, is not simply a descriptive matter of frequency distribution with no qual-itative implications, but a much broader and general phenomenon strongly affecting grammatical structure and textualorganization.

3.2. Passive structures with ser ‘be’

Variation between active and passive structures is one of the first phenomena to have been studied when theLabovian method was extended to syntax (cf. Weiner and Labov, 1983; Casanovas, 1999, p. 242). Carter and McCarthy(1999, p. 45, 57) carry out an inquiry on variation between English get- and be passives in spoken discourse (e.g. Mydog was run over by a truck/My dog got run over by a truck), which they see as an interpersonal and interactive phenom-enon with some semantic and notional distribution. The study reveals the existence of implications beyond syntacticstructure: there are semantic–pragmatic differences involved in the choice of get vs. be, such as the affective intent ofthe speaker, who tends to use get to convey more problematic or adverse circumstances. On a more abstract level, itcould be said that be passives focus on the event, while get ones stress the speaker’s or other participants’ involvementin it. In English, the passive has been exhaustively studied9; on the other hand, in Spanish it remains a poorly understoodconstruction, not just from a correlational variationist perspective, but even more so from the discursive-pragmatic, inter-actional and sociostylistic ones.

Grammatically as well as notionally, passive structures – as opposed to their active counterparts – can be regarded ascommunicative strategies for the raising of a semantic object to the syntactic position of the subject, which involves an

, the dative is almost categorical in the corpus when addressing the second person, though not third ones (2006b, p. 236).ning (1996), Givón & Yang (1994) and Gronemeyer (1999).


increase in its perceptual salience, manifested mainly through verbal agreement. The patient of the event gets discur-sively thematized and becomes the main perspective from which such an event is regarded. Conversely, the agent willgenerally be introduced in discourse as new information, that is, it will be more informational but less salient (cf. Givón,1990, p. 563; Fernández, 2004). It has often been shown that sentence-initial position tends to imply the highest cogni-tive salience, since those elements placed at the beginning are considered the most crucial ones and have the power tocondition the interpretation of the remainder of the clause (cf. Virtanen, 2004, pp. 84–88; Fried, 2009).

10

anpa

9a.

We muinanim

ssive is

Juan compró la casa‘John bought the house’

9b.
La casa fue comprada por Juan‘The house was bought by John’
It follows that the passive could be used as a stylistic resource to highlight the salience of the patient of an event.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Spanish grammar generally allows for the patient to be thematized without achange in its syntactic function; such is the case with La casa la compró Juan ‘The house John bought it’, with the coref-erential clitic establishing object agreement with the verb and thus also stressing the salience of its referent.10 This sug-gests that the variable under consideration may not be limited to the mere choice between active and passive, and thatdeeper insight would be needed to ascertain the complete array of variants available, as well as the factors promotingthe choice of one over the others. One of the most common and serious criticisms of quantitative sociolinguistics is basedon its somewhat arbitrary way of formalizing variables and its supposition that the variants are in complementary distri-bution. It is no easy task to elucidate all the elements or structures that could possibly have been formulated in some con-text (cf. Preston, 2001).
Due to this, in the current state of knowledge it seems more cautious to merely count the total occurrences of passivestructures across texts and investigate whether there may exist any relationship with situational and stylistic factors. Thatis, passive usage will be considered in absolute rather than relative terms. Such a procedure has already been adopted inworks like those of Dines (1980), Macaulay (2005, 2009) or Aijón Oliva and Serrano (forthcoming).

That the Spanish passive is related to patient thematization is substantiated by the fact that, out of 179 items in the MED-IASA corpus, 169 (94.4%) have their subject preposed to the verb or, in some cases, as the head of a relative clause. Figs. 1 and2 show that the distribution of passive structures across the different written and oral media genres in the corpus is clearlyuneven:

However, this could obviously be an effect of the unequal word number of the genres included in the corpus. So, in orderto better ascertain the relative weight of the construction in each genre, the average number of items per 10,000 words iscalculated. This statistical index makes it possible to objectively compare the distribution of the structure in all genres, asshown in Tables 2 and 3.

This shows that the ser passive is much more frequent in written than spoken language; in fact it is often deemed astereotype of written media language by Spanish speakers. This would seem to make it a characteristic feature ofjournalistic talk. It is also particularly remarkable that more than half of the passives in the written corpus appear innews items.

10.
La víctima era un hombre de 73 años que fue atropellado por un turismo en la avenida Alfonso XIII . . . la calle PadreIgnacio Ellacuría fue el escenario de una colisión entre un turismo, conducido por M.C.B.S., y un ciclomotor,pilotado por O.S.G., que resultó herido grave y fue trasladado al Hospital Clínico <Not-Ad-170504-13>‘The victim was a 73-year-old man who was run over by a car on the Alfonso XIII avenue. . . Padre Ignacio EllacuríaStreet was the scene of a crash between a car, driven by M.C.B.S., and a moped, ridden by O.S.G., who got severelyinjured and was carried to the Clinical Hospital.’
The passive in Spanish is most likely a cliché of textual genres tending to the informational rather than to the interactional
pole of communication. With its thematization of a former object, it contributes to textual cohesion and continuity. Giventhat it is journalists that are most often responsible for such texts in the domain of the media, it may be no wonder thatthe structure have come to be associated to their speech as a professional group. Again a precedence of situational factorsover social or group ones might be pointed out, but it must be added that the former seem in turn to be based on cognitivevalues.
In sum, the use of passive structures with ser constitutes an instance of syntactic variation as a means to create styles,based on the perceptual meaning of the raising of an object-patient, by which it is granted a more thematized and salientstatus. Similar discursive–cognitive values had previously been identified by Delbecque (2003, pp. 373–374), who believesthat passive structures provide speakers with a higher degree of subtlety and variety in the configuration of participant rolesthan their corresponding active structures. They embody a notional viewpoint that can be metaphorically termed upstreamand whose goal is to reduce the transitivity of the clause.

st also mention a quite characteristic construction of Spanish, the so-called reflex passive, in which the third-person reflexive clitic se is used to markate subject as patient while blurring the presence of the agent: La casa se compró ‘The house was bought’. Even though its parallelism to the serobvious, it also has important formal and semantic peculiarities which cannot be dealt with extensively in the present paper.

Ads 2 5%

Sports 5 11%

News reports 15 35%

Music 6 14%

Magazines 15 35%

Fig. 2. Passive structures in radio genres.

Table 2Frequency index of passive structures in written genres.

Written genres Frequency index

Opinion pieces 7.3 (22)Letters to the editor 8.6 (13)Interviews 3.3 (5)News items 12.7 (76)Stories 6.6 (20)

Total count 9.1 (136)

Table 3Frequency index of passive structures in oral genres.

Oral genres Frequency index

Advertisements 1.3 (2)Sport programs 1.4 (5)News reports 8.3 (15)Music programs 2.9 (6)Magazines 2.4 (15)

Total count 2.8 (43)

Opinion 22 16%

Letters 13 9%

Interviews 5 4%

News items 76 56%

Stories 20 15%

Fig. 1. Passive structures in written press genres.


3.3. Functional marking of relatives

Relative heads are subject to certain variable phenomena that can be accounted for with regard to stylistic and discursive-cognitive factors. As is known, besides introducing their subordinate clause, relatives perform a syntactic function inside it.This grammatical category has in fact inherited some traits of Latin declension even if the morphological case markingthat can still be glimpsed across the paradigm (que ‘who, which’, quien ‘who’, cuyo ‘whose’, donde ‘where’, etc.) is being


progressively replaced by syntactic means, namely the adjoining of prepositions: a quien ‘to who’, con quien ‘with who’, etc. Itis worth noting that when a relative functioning as an indirect object is not accompanied by the standard mark for this func-tion in Spanish (the preposition a), it becomes necessary to resume its referent inside the relative clause with a coreferentialclitic (11b). Such a clitic is however merely optional when the preposition appears (11a).

11

mo

11a.

Whatdality (

Vino una mujer a la que (le) habían robado un bolso‘A woman came from whom a handbag had been stolen (from her)’

11b.
Vino una mujer que (*Ø/le) habían robado un bolso‘A woman came that a handbag had been stolen from her’
The clitic assuming the marking function of the preposition has sometimes been called pleonastic or resumptive (cf. AijónOliva, 2006a, 272). Relatives seem to be undergoing a grammaticalization process whereby they get progressively deprivedof their pronominal character and become mere subordinating conjunctions:

12. Un estudiante (al) que solo le faltaban dos asignaturas para acabar la carrera (Brucart 1999, 404)
‘A student (for) who just two more courses were needed for him to get his degree.’11
Since it is relatives functioning as clause subjects that never bear any prepositions, we could venture that the non-standardformulation of an objectual relative without them is an indication that its referent possesses a higher salience than what ismost typical of objects. The categoricity of clitic agreement could also be a sign of this value, since agreement with the verbseems to be one of the main manifestations of the higher cognitive prominence of syntactic elements (cf. Sections 3.1 and 3.2).

The lack of case marking can be most easily perceived in restrictive clauses where the norm states it should go with therelative que, as in the following example:

13.
Y/l- hay gente/Ø que: a lo mejor no le gusta verse retratada en:: según qué situaciones <Var-SE-300503-19:25>‘And there are people who it’s not pleasing to them to be portrayed in certain situations’
In many cases the phenomenon is motivated by the fact that the same preposition has already appeared next to the ante-cedent and so its repetition could seem superfluous:

14.
Ha habido cambios en la formació:n/en el momento que tengamos más:-/más detalles/os comentaremos <Mus-40-220803-10:40>‘There have been some changes in the band. . . At the moment which [instead of at the moment at which] we getmore news, we’ll let you know’
Just like the results of the passive showed, the frequency of unmarked relatives bears some relationship to communica-tive modes and textual genres, as can be inferred from the statistical distribution displayed in Table 4.

The low frequency in written media language of a non-standard variant like the absence of prepositions is not surprising.But it should also be pointed out that subordinate relative clauses in general are more abundant in written discourse,whereas orality is known to generally prefer coordination and juxtaposition to subordination. As for written press genres(Table 5), the closer we get to the prototype of written informational communication, which would be represented hereby news items and stories, the more frequent the functional mark becomes. Conversely, the lowest proportion is obtainedby interviews, probably due to the fact that these texts are mostly transcriptions of oral conversations. Argumentative genreslike opinion pieces and letters to the editor achieve intermediate results.

The tendencies for oral genres may not be as clearcut, but the general results seem to allow for the same conclusions. Casemarking is especially frequent in those radio programs where informational and highly pre-planned segments are predom-inant, such as news reports and magazines. On the other hand, music programs achieve a high percentage of unmarked rel-atives as broadcasters generally seem to seek a more spontaneous, casual style. Fig. 3 condenses the values obtained bywritten vs. oral genres as for the functional (un)marking of relatives.

The shortage of unmarked relatives in some oral genres such as news reports, sport programs or commercials is partlyattributable to the low frequency of relative clauses themselves in those genres. All data seem to indicate that the variableunder scrutiny is related to the stylistic differences between prototypical orality and literacy, just as it constitutes a resourcein itself to construct stylistic meanings in accordance with the characteristics of both communicative modes. When the func-tional mark of a relative is suppressed, the referent signaled by the relative becomes more cognitively salient and this maycondition the informational and interactive values of discourse. Further analysis of this phenomenon in conversational cor-pora could lend support to the previous statements.

3.4. Variable expression and placement of subject pronouns as an (im)politeness strategy

As is known, the formulation of subject pronouns is generally optional in Spanish: Yo digo/Ø digo ‘(I) say’. Their appear-ance in the clause iconically stresses the discursive-pragmatic status of their referent as the protagonist of the event de-

is more, in exclamatory constructions such as ¡El calor que hace! ‘So hot that it is!’, the relative seems to act as a mere indicator of exclamatoryBrucart, 1999, p. 487).

Table 5Frequencies of functional marking of relatives in oral genres.

Oral genres Functionally marked Functionally unmarked

Advertisements 1 (50%) 1 (50%)Sport programs 9 (75%) 3 (25%)News reports 15 (100%) 0Music programs 8 (57.1%) 6 (42.9%)Magazines 46 (80.7%) 11 (19.3%)

Total count 79 (79%) 21 (21%)

020406080

100120140160180200

Written genres Oral genres

Marked relatives

Unmarked relatives

Fig. 3. Marked and unmarked relatives in written and oral discourse.

Table 4Frequencies of functional marking of relatives in written genres.

Written genres Functionally marked Functionally unmarked

Opinion pieces 31 (91.2%) 3 (8.8%)Letters to the editor 14 (93.3%) 1 (6.7%)Interviews 15 (78.9%) 4 (21.1%)News items 100 (99%) 1 (1%)Stories 33 (100%) 0

Total count 193 (95.5%) 9 (4.5%)


scribed, thanks again to the cognitive property of salience. Given that pronouns embody the perceptual presence of entitiesin a mental scene, we might hypothesize that an express subject will be more salient to the speaker than a non-express one,insomuch as it will be more clearly activated in the context (cf. Serrano and Aijón Oliva, 2010a).

Spanish grammar also allows for the variable placement of the subject, especially in declarative clauses. Rhematic ele-ments, which tend to be placed to the right of the clause, are at the same time those less deeply rooted in the perceptuallandscape, so the position of the subject as regards the verb might also be meaningful. When postposed (Lo dije yo ‘It saidI’), its perceptual salience will be smaller, but at the same time it will usually bear a higher informational load, the thematicposition being occupied by the object clitic. The contrary obtains with preverbal subjects (Yo lo dije ‘I it said’), these beingmore topical and salient, but less informational in the context. In sum, the presence vs. absence of the subject, as well asits placement with regard to the verb, are likely to affect the style of the sentence and hence its meaning.

Combining both facts we could imagine a scale from lowest to highest perceptual salience of subjects, as inversely pro-portional to their informativity: postverbal subject > preverbal subject > omitted subject. This is further elaborated inTable 6.

The subject is thus a syntactic function that always embodies some notional perspective of events. The speaker’s mindstructures the scene by way of semantic–pragmatic factors that reflect underlying cognitive schemata (Croft, 1991, p. 99).In fact, the speaker is believed to give priority to some elements of the scene, including or excluding certain participants fromit (Fillmore, 1977). The preverbal/postverbal placement of the subject and its expression/omission constitute formal variantsthat may be socio-communicatively distributed, leading to the creation of different meanings like those related to linguistic(im)politeness (cf. Section 3.1). Some previous studies had already suspected the existence of such stylistic values. LlorenteMaldonado (1977, p. 110) noted that the suppression of the subject in impersonal sentences with the clitic se may constitutea strategy of conversational politeness in some cases. Haverkate (1987) points out that, in such sentences, the speaker be-comes an indirect participant and so prevents his/her own person from being focused on.

Table 6Salience and informativity of the subject according to its formulation.

Subject Example (‘I come’) Cognitive salience Informativity in discourse

Postverbal Vengo yo �salient +informativePreverbal Yo vengo ±salient ±informativeOmitted Vengo +salient �informative


In this initial survey we will only try to check if the quantitative distribution of preverbal and postverbal subjects in con-versational texts can bear any relationship to socio-pragmatic and stylistic politeness functions. We start from the hypoth-esis that the different degrees of cognitive salience suggested by preverbal or postverbal subject placement shouldpragmatically affect the interpretation of the referent’s image either by diminishing potential threats on it (mitigating or flat-tering politeness) or by reinforcing such threats or simply not amending them (impoliteness) respectively. We have analyzedseveral texts from two of the aforementioned corpora: Conversation Corpus of Canary Islands Spanish (CCEC) and C-Oral-Rom, collecting 540 items of express subject pronouns (either preverbal or postverbal).

The results indicate that the postverbal position seems to convey objectualization of the subject and hence a decrease inthe flow of energy between the subject and the object.12 Thus postposition indexes a perception of the subject as less agentiveand more of a dative or beneficiary, following the natural tendencies of syntactic objects (Dixon, 1979, p. 152). In order to ac-count for intransitive clauses, agentivity could be reformulated more generally as foregrounding within the clause (Wårvik,2004, 102). A postposed subject such as in ¿Está usted bien? ‘Are you OK?’ is less salient than in the alternative ¿Usted está bien?‘You are OK?’ (cf. also Serrano and Aijón Oliva, 2010b).

Such is also the case with example (15), taken from a narrative monologue in which the speaker refers to an indirect par-ticipant that functions as the argumentative content of indirect speech. The objectualization and the lesser salience of thepostposed subject result pragmatically in the maintenance of the threat on its referent. This may constitute a strategy toreinforce the contentious orientation of the text, since the informative focus is placed on the referent.

12

thonthLasu

15.

By those of t

the prat langngackebject, w

Ven porque ha llamado la señora de Peña/que/Emilia ya no le interesa//y eso yo lo sabía//se lo dije a la tíaMagdalena digo/cuando encuentre personas/la va a largar// (. . .) pues cuando me fui yo/me lo hubiese dicho usted amí también/eh? o cuando yo vine aquí me lo hubiese dicho usted/ a mí también/yo me la llevo y no la tiene ustedque despedir//luego no le dio la liquidación. . . bueno/tuvimos una disputa por teléfono. . . vamos discutí con ella yse lo dije//Magdalena/me dijo dice/no te deberías de callar//no te deberías de callar//porque lo ha hecho muy mal//y después de estar tú tanto tiempo/haciéndole un servicio (. . .) (C-Oral-Rom <efammn08>)‘Come here, because Mrs. Peña just called, saying she’s no longer interested in Emilia. I’d seen it coming. I told auntMagdalena, I say, ‘When she finds other people she’ll give her the boot. . . Well, when I left, you should have told metoo, right? Or else when I came here you should have told me too, so I could have taken her with me and youwouldn’t have had to fire her.’ Later she didnt give her the settlement. Well, we quarreled on the phone, I had anargument with her and I told her. Magdalena said, ‘you shouldn’t keep your mouth shut, because she’s been reallyunkind, specially after you have been serving her for so long’’

In turn, preverbal subjects may help mitigate or tone down an a priori controversial content, especially when compared tothe postverbal alternative. Placement before the verb is the most frequent solution with Spanish subjects and also seems tobe typical of human and thematic referents regardless of their syntactic function. It indexes an increase in the cognitive sal-ience of the subject – whose agentivity is stressed – as well as a decrease in its informational focalization, and thus may helpdignify the image of its referent at a socio-pragmatic level.

For instance, in texts like (16), taken from a meeting of workers in which there is little interaction with the audience, pre-verbal subjects can be found in the most controversial segments of the text, with the implicit goal of dignifying the image ofnosotros ‘us’ by iconically stressing its role in the positive actions carried out. The thematic position, aside from conveyinghigher salience and agentivity of the subject, moves the informational focus away from it.

16.
Las cuestiones que Ø planteamos n que se unificarán todas en un escrito son las siguientes //necesidad de igualar elrégimen normativo de convivencia en el centro ||| nosotros habíamos planteado que/estuvieran presentes elcoordinador del centro y el coordinador de Tenerife, pero. . . (. . .) nosotros presentamos un escrito|||en finntuvimosuna segunda asamblea (. . .) nosotros en esa reunión no teníamos noticia de que eso era legal (CCEC <ElTra0108>)
is we are alluding to the so-called canonical event model (Langacker, 1991, pp. 285–286), an archetypal cognitive schema comprising two main roles,he agent and the patient. The former is the source of energy and executes a volitive action, causing a change of state in the latter. This schema is basedototypical semantic roles of grammatical functions (subject-agent, object-patient) and serves as an archetype for the coding of those mental scenesuages tend to develop as basic-type clauses (Langacker, 2000, p. 43). Agentivity is one of the main semantic manifestations of salience. Even ifr does not explicitly tackle the ordering of elements within the clause, we believe his theoretical model can be used to explain the placement of thehich in adopting the prototypical position of objects undergoes a decrease in its agentivity together with a rise in its informativity or focalization.

0% 50% 100%

Postverbal subjects (C-Oral-Rom)

Postverbal subjects (CCEC)

Preverbal subjects (C-Oral-Rom)

Preverbal subjects (CCEC)

Dignifying

Pejorative

Fig. 4. Distribution of interactional strategies according to the preverbal/postverbal placement of subject pronouns.


‘The questions (we) are raising, which will all be gathered in a document, are the following. First, the necessity ofgeneralizing the norms for coexistence in the center. We suggested that both the center coordinator and the one inTenerife be present, but. . . We submitted a document and held a second meeting. . . At the time of that meeting wewere not aware that that was legal.’

Fig. 4 summarizes the general data for preverbal and postverbal subjects in both corpora under scrutiny. There is a fairly
clear association between preposition and dignifying interactional strategies, as well as between postposition and pejorativeimages of the referent. This again makes it possible to conclude that the cognitive properties of syntactic structures can becontextually projected on stylistic meanings.
4. Conclusions

In this paper we have argued for an approach to syntactic variation that takes into account both its cognitive foundationsand the possibilities these offer for the creation of stylistic meanings in social interaction. Adopting a cognitive viewpointalong the lines exposed means accepting that whenever we speak we choose not only the form of a message, but also itscontent. When some linguistic structure is formulated instead of other possible ones, a particular orientation of the utteranceis being selected at the same time. Perceptual notions such as those of salience and informativity, here seen as gradual innature, help explain the existence and usage of the grammatical forms reviewed here, which due to their intrinsic meaningscan contribute to the construction of communicative styles in interaction.

Variable object agreement by means of verbal clitics is the first phenomenon in which we have shown how perceptuallymeaningful variants allow for different communicative styles to be shaped and sociosituationally distributed. Non-agree-ment is most typical of written and informational discourse – the types of communication evolving mostly around objects– and it also tends to characterize the style of professional communicators and writers. In an interactional level, it seems tobe a potential resource for impoliteness. All this can be theoretically related to its indexation of lesser salience of the entitiesinvolved in discourse. Much the same can be said as for variation in clitic placement in verbal periphrases and as for thechoice between accusative and dative clitics: there seems to be a fundamental connection between cognitive categories, sta-tistical distribution across social and stylistic continua and interactional usage.

The rise of a semantic object to the syntactic position of the subject also illustrates how differences in perceptual salienceengender different meanings that are in turn transformed into stylistic strategies. In passive constructions with ser, the pa-tient gets thematized and becomes the most salient element in the clause. These structures constitute a productive stylisticresource in mass media texts, again probably due to their typical association to written and highly planned communication.Similarly, variable case marking of relative heads helps establish differences between oral and written genres, which in turngive rise to socially and situationally specialized styles.

Finally, preverbal vs. postverbal placement of pronominal subjects also reflects varying degrees along the perceptualscales of salience and informativity. A preverbal subject will be perceived as more salient than a postverbal one, whereasthe latter will tend to constitute the informational focus of the clause. Again we have been able to find some relationshipbetween this variable phenomenon and interactional (im)politeness, with subject preposition being preferred for positiveor flattering contexts. Our findings substantiate the possibility of developing a theory of politeness centered on internalgrammatical aspects, this being a scarcely explored direction so far (cf. Kasper, 2009, p. 165).

In sum, formal variants are not (as long posited by the mainstream variationist view) different ways to say the same,which should in fact be a theoretical impossibility, but rather different ways to say different things (Halliday et al., 1968;


Beaugrande and Dressler, 1999, p. 103).13 Styles are the different ways to shape, organize and communicate what is in themind of speakers. Our concept of linguistic style is quite far from a neutral consideration of variables and variants in the tra-ditional Labovian fashion: the alleged need to view variants as synonymous becomes senseless in light of the most recent the-ories on style and syntactic variation. What really needs to be undertaken from this point on is the analysis of different ways ofspeaking, as had already been proposed from ethnographic sociolinguistics (Hymes, 1974).

Thus one of the many suggestive facets of this new approach to variation is the chances it will offer to contrast commu-nicative styles from different speech varieties, based on the social distribution of the meanings that stem from variation. Thechoices made by speakers in the course of interaction simultaneously affect all internal and external levels of meaning. It willbe the task of future research to elucidate the essential discursive and cognitive dimensions differentiating between styles, aswell as the linguistic variants that embody such dimensions and the nature of their co-occurrence patterns, following someof the lines suggested in this study.

Role of funding sources

Research project entitled: ‘‘Los estilos de comunicación y sus bases cognitivas en el estudio de la variación sintáctica enespañol” (FFI2009–07181/FILO), funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.

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Syntactic variation and communicative style