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Profiling Discourse Participants
Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates
The construction of discourse is a challenging field where many discourse structures and interactional effects remain poorly understood. This analysis provides a systematic explanation for the way in which discourse participants (speaker and hearer) are construed in Spanish through a corpus-driven analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates. It deals not only with person deixis, but with the full range of possibilities speakers choose from when profiling their self or their relationship with the interlocutor. This analysis also offers new insights into the operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as tools for the analysis of person reference and genre comparison. The comparative and corpus-driven approach offers methodological tools for genre analysis that can be transposed to other languages and/or genres. The detailed description of three socially highly relevant discourse types from a cognitive-functional perspective makes this book a useful resource not only for pragmatists but also for researchers in political and media discourse.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 246] 2014. xvii, 307 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 11 August 2014
Published online on 11 August 2014
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- List of figures | pp. ix–x
- List of tables | pp. xi–xii
- List of abbreviations | pp. xiii–xiv
- Acknowledgements | pp. xv–xviii
- Chapter I. General introduction | pp. 1–20
- Chapter II. Person deixis | pp. 21–152
- Chapter III. Discourse participant profiling beyond person deixis | pp. 153–186
- Chapter IV. Indeterminate constructions | pp. 187–228
- Chapter V. Discourse participant profiling: An integrated account | pp. 229–266
- Chapter VI. Conclusions and prospects for further research | pp. 267–274
- Index | pp. 303–307
“Barbara De Cock's book makes an important contribution to our understanding of discourse in different interactional text types, showing the way participant profiling shapes discourse structure through personal deixis and other resources. A must-read for anyone interested in discourse linguistics.”
Joaquín Garrido Medina, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Cited by (28)
Cited by 28 other publications
Fábregas, Antonio
De Cock, Barbara & Jan Albert van Laar
2024. Self-reference as an argumentative tool. In Self- and Other-Reference in Social Contexts [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 342], ► pp. 39 ff.
Aijón Oliva, Miguel Ángel
De Cock, Barbara & Carolina Figueras Bates
2023. Peer experts as actors for shared understanding in Spanish online health fora. In A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 338], ► pp. 291 ff.
Šmídová, Markéta
De Cock, Barbara & Bettina Kluge
2022. On the referential ambiguity of personal pronouns and its pragmatic consequences. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 351 ff.
Kluge, Bettina
2022. Generic uses of the second person singular – how speakers deal with referential ambiguity and misunderstandings. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 501 ff.
Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea & Barbara De Cock
2022. Taboo effects at the syntactic level. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 113 ff.
Soler Bonafont, María Amparo
Soler Bonafont, M. Amparo
Vázquez Laslop, María Eugenia
2019. Pragmatic and grammatical categories for the analysis of forms of address in presidential election debates. In It’s not all about you [Topics in Address Research, 1], ► pp. 305 ff.
Aijón Oliva, Miguel A.
Aijón Oliva, Miguel A.
2025. “No se puede ser más tonto”. In Beyond Binaries in Address Research [Topics in Address Research, 6], ► pp. 242 ff.
Aijón Oliva, Miguel Á.
De Cock, Barbara & Cristian González Arias
De Cock, Barbara, Aurélie Marsily, Andrea Pizarro Pedraza & Marie Rasson
Mulder, Gijs
2018. (Yo) creo queas a marker of evidentiality and epistemic modality. In Evidence for Evidentiality [Human Cognitive Processing, 61], ► pp. 99 ff.
Serrano, María José
Serrano, María José
2019. The variable functions of addressing hearer-participants with Spanish second person object forms in media discourse. In It’s not all about you [Topics in Address Research, 1], ► pp. 281 ff.
Serrano, María José
2025. Building spaces for the Spanish second-person singular tú viewpoint. Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures 60:2 ► pp. 153 ff.
De Cock, Barbara & Neus Nogué Serrano
Posio, Pekka
Bolly, Catherine T., George Christodoulides & Anne Catherine Simon
Rasson, Marie
De Cock, Barbara
2015. Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and non-subjectivity across spoken language genres. Spanish in Context 12:1 ► pp. 10 ff.
De Cock, Barbara
2022. Register, genre and referential ambiguity of personal pronouns. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 361 ff.
De Cock, Barbara
2026. Do we think populists actually do something?. In Multilingual Corpus Research [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 126], ► pp. 151 ff.
Glynn, Dylan
2014. Techniques and tools. In Corpus Methods for Semantics [Human Cognitive Processing, 43], ► pp. 307 ff.
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