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Article published In: Revue Romane
Vol. 60:2 (2025) ► pp.153–181

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Articles linguistiques

Building spaces for the Spanish second-person singular tú viewpoint

ORCiD logo with link | Universidad de La Laguna
Published online: 25 November 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.22009.ser
Abstract
The second-person singular tú in Spanish usually extends its reference to the speaker as well as to the audience, turning into a communicative resource that invests the content with an objective meaning. This investigation analyzes the linguistic elements that help to construct the second-person singular tú as an objectivizing viewpoint. To create such a viewpoint space builders play an essential role. Their function is to create a cognitive viewpoint of the event, placing the content on an imperfective temporal axis which provides it with a regular and continuous meaning. The infinitive, the clitic se, unspecific NPs, the pronoun uno and temporal markers cuando and si are the space builders considered to promote the objectiving meaning of the second-person singular tú.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction. Pronominal person choice, mental spaces and viewpoint
  • 2.The objectivizing second-person singular. State of the art
  • 3.Methodology and corpus
  • 4.Space builders in objectivizing 2ndsg tú and the linguistic viewpoint
    • 4.1The infinitive
    • 4.2The clitic se
    • 4.3Unspecific noun phrases (NPs)
    • 4.4The pronoun uno (‘one’)
    • 4.5The adverb cuando
    • 4.6The particle si
  • 5.The frequency of space builders
  • 6.Conclusions and prospects
  • Notes
  • References
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