Abstract
This paper examines overt and covert speaker/addressee pronouns with the cognitive verbs creer ‘think/believe’ and saber ‘know’ in a corpus of spoken peninsular Spanish – the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014– ) – with a focus on 1st person singular (yo) creo que ‘(I) think that’. Departing from the observation made in the literature that overt pronouns are highly frequent with creer and that topic shift cannot account for all of them, it will be argued that perspectival factors related to evidentiality/epistemicity and subjectivity influence overt pronoun realization. A corpus study was conducted to investigate whether (i) [person] and [polarity] and (ii) the type of complement affect overt pronoun realization with the cognitive verbs creer and saber. The results indicate that the type of belief expressed in the embedded clause should be taken into account, as well as person and polarity. The ultimate trigger for phonetic realization of speaker/addressee pronouns will be argued to be the notion of contrast: cognitive verbs whose embedded complement encodes evaluations and non-visual, abstract information have high frequencies of overt pronoun realization because these contexts favor the evoking of alternative perspective holders. Overt pronouns will be analyzed as the result of a [+contrast] feature which is assigned to the specifier of a functional category encoding perspective in the split IP.
Highlights
The null subject property has been one of the most thoroughly studied phenomena in generative theory
It will be argued that the close connection between contrast, evaluative uses, and speaker perspective has the consequence that the subject pronoun and cognitive verb are not always generated within vP, but that they can be directly merged in the functional category F encoding perspective
This paper has investigated speaker/addressee pronouns with cognitive verbs in the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014-)
Summary
The null subject property has been one of the most thoroughly studied phenomena in generative theory. A corpus study of the Madrid and Alcalá samples in PRESEEA (2014-), was conducted to investigate null and overt 1st and 2nd person singular pronouns with two cognitive verbs – creer ‘believe/think’ and saber ‘know’. These verbs were chosen because they offer a testing ground for the role that subjectivity and epistemicity/evidentiality play for overt subject licensing. Overt pronoun frequencies will be argued to be highest with verbs like creer because they can be used to express personal opinions (Aijón Oliva & Serrano 2010; Posio 2014) and, relatedly, they leave unspecified the degree of subjective truth probability (Lewis 1976; Davis et al 2007) of the embedded proposition.
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