The expression and use of 1st person plural references in Spanish foreign affairs discourse.

(eng) My paper will deal with the analysis of person marking by means of pronominals and covert subjects in Spanish foreign policy discourse. I will pay special attention to the importance of these forms for the construction of group references. Therefore, I will focus on 1st person plural references rather than forms of address (as in i.a. Blas Arroyo 2000). Indeed, the construction of group references is a core element of political discourse (Chilton 2004, Chilton – Schäffner 2002, Gelabert 2004, Iñigo-Mora 2004, Maitland – Wilson 1987, Nuñez Cabezas – Guerrero Salazar 2002). In this respect, foreign affairs discourse is an even bigger challenge to the speaker, since it includes an even higher amount of possible references to both national and international groups, to both political and non-political entities. The corpus consists of the discourses of two Spanish foreign affairs secretaries (Josep Piqué and Ana Palacio). For each of these speakers, I have established 2 subcorpora: (i) discourses to the UN General Assembly and other UN bodies, (ii) interventions in the Spanish Parliament (Congreso Nacional), both as they have been published on the respective official websites. The data cover the period 2001-2003, a government and secretary switch having taken place mid-2002. The approach consists of a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of pronominal deictics in this corpus. The quantitative analysis establishes the relative frequency of the use of overt versus covert 1st person plural subject pronouns (nosotros versus ø subject) (Delbecque 1992). Furthermore, my analysis will include the use of 1st person plural possessive pronouns in the construction of the 1st person plural mental space, e.g. in (…) defender de manera conjunta nuestros valores fundamentales como sociedades abiertas (…) (Ana Palacio in 2002). In the qualitative analysis, I will focus on the alternation between inclusive and exclusive uses of 1st person plural references (Cysouw 2003: 2). This alternation will be linked to the data obtained in the quantitative analysis. The expected results are twofold. Firstly, I will try to give a more detailed description of the opposition overt / covert 1st person plural in Spanish political discourse. Secondly, I will look into the differences in usage with respect to the speaker and the subcorpus (which can be considered a function of the public and context of the discourse).