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

Miguel A. Aijón Oliva
Universidad de Salamanca

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.

Publication history

Date received: 30 August 2024

Date accepted: 6 December 2024

Published online: 31 July 2025

Table of contents

In many languages, infinitives are characterized by the absence of tense and aspect morphemes, as well as of person and number ones. These verbal forms have been noted to construe events as independent of specific coordinates of person, place or time, that is, as ungrounded according to the communicative situation (Langacker 2008, 438; Vanderschueren 2013, 15–17; Visapää 2022, 528).

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