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Infinitives, discourse viewpoint, and referential interpretation of the initiator in Spanish digital news discourse

ORCiD logo with link | Universidad de Salamanca
Published online: 31 July 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24071.aij
Abstract
This study examines the possible intended references of unidentified initiators — agents or experiencers — of Spanish infinitives in a corpus of digital news texts and readers’ comments to them. Four basic referential interpretations are discussed: external references, generic ones, the audience, and the writer. They largely depend on contextual elements functioning as viewpoint builders and including the semantics of the predicate, spatial and temporal locatives, grammatical marks of the direct participants, and other defocusing constructions. Quantitative analysis reveals patterns of co-occurrence between the referential categories and the different types of viewpoint builders. Besides, such references are unequally distributed across the two kinds of textual sequences considered. The results underscore the complexity of the interpretive processes involved in reference assignment. While all uses of the infinitive are semantically unified by its function of construing events as ungrounded, they can produce quite different pragmatic outcomes in interaction with contextual and situational features.
Article outline
  • 1.The problem: The identification of the initiator with infinitives
  • 2.Corpus, research questions, and methodology
  • 3.Viewpoint and the interpretation of reference with defocusing constructions
  • 4.The referential interpretations of the initiator of infinitives
    • 4.1External references of variable specificity
    • 4.2Generic references: The participants and others
    • 4.3The audience: Generalizing the actions or stances of the other
    • 4.4The writer: Personal views and experiences from an ungrounded viewpoint
  • 5.The distribution of referential readings according to viewpoint builders and textual sequences
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (43)
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