Syntactic Variation and Communicative Style

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Syntactic variation and communicative style
Article in Language Sciences · January 2011

DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2010.08.008
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María José Serrano Miguel Ángel Aijón Oliva

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Language Sciences 33 (2011) 138–153
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Language Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci
Syntactic variation and communicative style

María José Serrano a,⇑, Miguel Ángel Aijón Oliva b,1
a
Departamento de Filología Española, Universidad de La Laguna, Campus de Guajara s/n, 38071 Tenerife, Spain
b
Departamento de Lengua Española, Universidad de Salamanca, Plaza de Anaya, 1, 37008 Salamanca, Spain
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: Advances in the study of morphosyntactic variation make it possible to move beyond the
Received 4 May 2010 view of variants as merely formal alternatives conveying a single meaning and covarying
Received in revised form 3 August 2010 with social features and formality of the situation. Alternating grammatical structures
Accepted 19 August 2010
always entail certain communicative differences at the discursive-pragmatic and cognitive
levels, and speakers can deploy their formal choices as stylistic resources. In this paper we
will outline some basic tenets for a comprehensive theoretical approach to variation, start-
Keywords:
ing from a concept of style as the construction of meaning in interaction. We will survey
Syntactic variation
Meaning
some cases of syntactic variation in Spanish, showing how the approach proposed can help
Style explain their existence within the system by taking their communicative and perceptual
Social interaction foundations into account.
Cognition Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Communication
1. The sociolinguistic concept of style
1.1. Style and sociolinguistic structure
Style can be seen as the third component of sociolinguistic variation, aside from the linguistic and the social (Rickford and
Eckert, 2001, p. 1). It is also the less homogeneous one, encompassing variation within the speaker as an individual and not
(just) as a member of a speech community and/or social group. Stylistic variation is considered basic, though not exclusively
individual in nature, and comprises the range of expressive possibilities whereby a speaker or group of speakers manage all
their linguistic activities. One of the best possible definitions of style, notwithstanding its apparent vagueness, might well be
the one put forward by Coupland: ‘Style refers to a way of doing something’ (2007: p. 1). However, in most cases it has been
analyzed only with regard to intraspeaker variation as well as to somewhat diffuse notions like those of prestige or formality,
specially within variationist sociolinguistics.
Although it has often been pointed out that research on the field of style could be the key to the development of an inte-
grated theoretical model of language, encompassing system and usage as well as the different kinds of synchronic variation
(Cheshire, 1987; Biber, 1994; Rickford, 2001, p. 231), such a goal is still far from being achieved. In fact, style is generally
regarded as a secondary matter in variationist investigations (cf. Chambers, 2005, p. 6). As is known, it has traditionally been
understood as a consequence of the degree of linguistic awareness speakers have in a given situation, and of their ability to
control the variants they (supposedly) have at their disposal (Labov, 1966, 1972, 2001). In Labov’s view, style is largely sub-
ordinate to social differences in talk, that is, social stratification is considered wider than the stylistic one and comprising it,
so there can be said to exist a whole stylistic range within each social category (cf. also Bell, 2001,p. 145).
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 922 317679; fax: +34 922 317611.
E-mail addresses: mjserran@ull.es (M.J. Serrano), maaijon@usal.es (M.Á. Aijón Oliva).
1
Tel.: +34 923 294445; fax: +34 923 294586.
0388-0001/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2010.08.008
M.J. Serrano, M.Á. Aijón Oliva / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 138–153 139
This means that different social groups tend to correlate their linguistic usages to the styles associated to them, so social
stratification may be parallel to those styles disposed along the axis of formality–informality (Labov, 2001, p. 86). As Coup-
land (2007, pp. 38–39)) correctly points out, the supposition that all speakers in a given social group will exhibit similar style
shifts in the same contexts reveals a clearly behaviorist orientation – especially if it is to imply that speakers cannot move
beyond the stylistic limits defined by their social ascription. In this sense, style would have to be understood simply as the
actualization in discourse of the linguistic variants characterizing a social group.
Anyway, most studies carried out so far have indeed suggested the existence of an intersection between social and sty-
listic variation. Each social group is supposed to have at its disposal a given range of stylistic variation that may partly over-
lap with those of neighboring groups. An important theoretical question is that concerning the nature and origin of this
intersection, which has been tackled in different ways.
A first hypothesis is that patterns of stylistic variation mirror those of the social (Bell, 1984, 2001), meaning stylistic var-
iation is contained within the limits of social variation and is smaller than it. This is the position held by the audience design
approach, according to which style largely consists of imitating the talk of the social group which the hearer supposedly be-
longs to or which he/she wishes to identify with. In successive reformulations of his model, Bell has come to admit that the
creative or initiative dimension of style, at first considered unimportant, can be at least as relevant as the responsive one, and
that an explanatory theory of style should encompass both.
The influence of other situational aspects, such as setting or topic, would be due to the typical association of these with
certain kinds of audiences. When no attempt to accommodate is found, but rather to diverge linguistically from the hearer, it
can be explained as referee design, whereby the speaker seeks to associate him/herself to a different social group. Bell’s ap-
proach assumes that speakers will tend to reduce social distance by sharing linguistic variants and varieties. People are con-
sidered to have the ability to converge in many discursive aspects (cf. Mesthrie et al., 2003, p. 151) because linguistic
accomodation is and/or is generally perceived as profitable for the speaker as well as for the hearer (Coupland, 1984).2
But there is also the opposite view, suggesting that patterns of social variation in a community are a reflection of the sit-
uational or stylistic ones. This has been defended mainly by Finegan and Biber (1994, 2001) and summarized in a register
axiom according to which linguistic differences between social groups result from the fact that members of any given group
do not take part as frequently in all kinds of interactions, but are more experienced and proficient in some than others. In the
long run, the traits typical of such interactions will be incorporated to their social dialects. Since it is generally assumed that
the higher the sociocultural level, the greater the skill in written styles or registers, those functional features most usual in
written language should become associated to socially privileged groups. Therefore this model proposes that all linguistic
traits and frequencies usually attributed to group ascription of any kind (social class, gender, age, etc.) may in fact derive
from situational variation.
However, both proposals may reveal an excessively structural orientation in their neat distinction of different types of
variation, as well as in their search for some one-way cause-effect relationship between them. Linguistic style constitutes
a complex set of culturally established ways of speaking that are closely linked to other cultural dimensions. This makes
it possible for speakers to employ stylistic variation as a repertoire to set up presuppositions and inferences of various kinds.
Along these lines, Coupland’s approach (2001) assumes that it is (geographical or social) dialect variation that enables the
existence of different styles or ways of talking. The specific traits of any variety are perfectly fit to articulate the social iden-
tity of the speaker and his/her communicative goals, since a link exists between variants and social meanings that are al-
ready culturally indexed (2001, p. 190). This should mean that speaking in a dialect or variety is in fact to speak through
it (2001, p. 204). Linguistic dialects or varieties are thus social styles and will be used as means to depict social identity from
a cognitive point of view in which linguistic usage creates the communicative situation. However, it will be necessary to elu-
cidate how speakers use or execute social styles as ranges of communicatively symbolic possibilities (Coupland 2007, 2, 3).
One of the main contributions of this author to a theory of style is his overcoming of traditional restrictive concepts such as
those of speech community and dialect, as well as his refusal to submit the stylistic order to the social one as has been done by
other approaches. This opens a path towards less structural and more interactional views of style.
1.2. Style and interaction
It is easy to perceive a theoretical opposition between behaviorist and creative approaches to style, as well as to the lin-
guistic variability on which style is built (Bell, 1999). Some authors tend to see linguistic style as an automatic response to
the interactional norms of a situation; others emphasize speaker agency and the ability to redefine the situation by means of
creative linguistic choices. This contrast between reactive views (which have proved to be theoretically insufficient) and the
more recent initiative ones should not lead to radical positions; there is in fact the possibility that both kinds of approaches
are not incompatible (cf. Aijón Oliva, 2008, p. 17). The results of sociolinguistic inquiry suggest that the different communi-
cative scenarios within a social milieu will allow for different degrees of stylistic freedom. A speaker can choose to contra-
vene the norms of a situation, but the results of doing so may not always be socially or personally rewarding. Thus all stylistic
activity could be seen as resulting from the tension between what is promoted by some communicative situation (and the
2
In fact, Bell’s model shares a behaviorist orientation with Labov’s, since speakers are supposed to react more or less automatically to their audience. This
reactive facet of style shifting has indeed been confirmed by many empirical studies (cf. Schilling-Estes, 2004, p. 384).
140 M.J. Serrano, M.Á. Aijón Oliva / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 138–153
broader social context within which it occurs) vs. the particular goals of the speaker as a rational being with wishes and
needs of his/her own.
From current sociolinguistic approaches style can be inferred to be a mediating element between linguistic variation and
the social practices that help characterize the self and others: discourse and variation jointly constitute the basis for the con-
struction of linguistic styles. Social identity is linked to socio-communicative practices, and it is these that must be analyzed,
whether stylistic variation is associated to a group or to an individual. When styles are put in relation to such sociolinguistic
practices, the fundamental question that needs to be answered is ‘‘how social meaning gets constructed in linguistic varia-
tion” (Eckert, 2001, p. 124). In this sense, a style can be defined as a set of linguistic resources that are identifiable in social
practice; linguistic variables, and especially syntactic ones, are sociostylistically meaningful due to their role in the shaping
of personal and group styles (Eckert, 2004, p. 43; Auer, 2007).3 If we accept that the study of style must go far beyond the
attention-to-speech model, then not just structural social aspects, but also interactional, ethnographic-anthropological, psycho-
social and cognitive ones will have to be incorporated (cf. Selting, 2009; Ciliberti, 1993, p. 166). Human communication is a
matter of constructing and sharing meaning, however meaning is understood.
One of the major hindrances for variationism towards the development of a theory of its own has been the supposition
that the appearance of some variant in some context is the outcome of an independent factor or a combination of them. Sta-
tistical methodology itself favors such a perception. Even if it seems reasonable to think that a formal choice might be the
consequence of pre-existing conditions in some cases, in others it could just as well constitute the cause of such conditions,
or just co-occur with them in order to achieve some communicative goal. All elements in a situation may simultaneously
contribute to the creation of meanings. This is exactly what the abovementioned initiative approaches to style are about
(cf. also Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai, 2001).
It is also obvious that, save for special cases, no single linguistic choice will have the power to define a style in itself. Ervin-
Tripp (1972, p. 233) already pointed out the necessity of going beyond the analysis of isolated elements and observing their
patterns of co-occurrence. In the domain of corpus linguistics, Biber (1995) and Biber et al. (2006) propose a multi-dimen-
sional approach in which such patterns come to be the grounds on which the existence of a register continuum can be cer-
tified. Whether the stylistic traits of a social group are isolated or individual styles are described as means to shape social
identities, style should be conceived of as a way of representing and communicating reality, as well as of fulfilling the inten-
tion of the speaker to assimilate or to distance him/herself from others (cf. Duranti, 2000; Schilling-Estes, 2004, pp. 389–
390).
Therefore we will propose an approach in which linguistic variation is inextricably linked to communicative factors
(Schiffrin, 1984) and linguistic style is regarded as a process of construction of meaning in interaction. This goes in line with
the current tendency to revise the behavioristic orientation that has traditionally dominated variationist sociolinguistics (cf.
Aijón Oliva, 2006a, p. 693) and to complement such an approach with qualitative, interactional considerations.4
1.3. Style and syntax
The ideas that there exists variation at the morphosyntactic level and that it plays a crucial role in the configuration of
communicative styles are not new. They can be found all across the works by Lavandera (1978, 1984) already in the first
decades of Labovian variationism and as a consequence of extending to morphosyntax the methodology that had proved suc-
cessful at the phonological level.5 It is neither possible nor desirable to understand grammar without taking discourse and
communication into account. Lavandera’s contribution is an important one to the study of syntactic variation, since her findings
and observations make it possible to suspect that the distribution of differences in meaning, not just in form, is socially condi-
tioned and that different social groups will tend to exchange particular kinds of messages (1984, p. 14).
In fact, if one form is very frequent in contexts sharing certain semantic traits, that form will end up by incorporating such
traits to its meaning; hence variationist sociolinguistic research on syntax should incorporate the study of the distribution of
linguistic meanings (1984, p. 24, 34). Formal alternances apparently embodying the same communicative sense may be di-
vided into two groups: those contrasting stylistically, such as verbal tenses in conditional sentences (Si lo había sabido vs. Si
lo hubiera sabido ‘If I had known’), and those variants whose formal differences are invested with social and situational sig-
nificance by way of their usage in particular contexts of communication. An example of the latter would be the use of the
indicative when conveying higher logical probability (Si tengo tiempo, voy a la peluquería ‘If I have time, I’ll go to the hair-
dresser’s’), as opposed to the subjunctive and the conditional when there is a lesser likelihood for the hypothesis to be ful-
filled (Si tuviera tiempo, iría a la peluquería ‘If I had time, I would go to the hairdresser’s’) (Serrano, 1994, pp. 120–121).
Building partly on such a contribution, here we will posit the idea that the particular meanings associated to grammatical
variants help shape communicative styles in discourse, and that this is ultimately due to the cognitive properties of gram-
mar. We take the starting point that syntactic variants materialize non-equivalent meanings and that these are distributed
3
Social identity can and should be analyzed with regard to anthropological and ethnographic values. Studying style from the perspective of speaker design
implies resourcing to the ethnographic level at which individual and group stylistic meanings will be best understood (Schilling-Estes, 2004, p. 393; Coupland,
2007, p. 26).
4
Such an orientation had already been suggested in order to improve research on syntactic variation (Serrano, 2006, p. 3).
5
This extension engendered a long controversy on the suitability of the variationist method to study non-phonological phenomena (cf. Serrano, 2010), which
we hope will be regarded as irrelevant when the principles exposed here are taken into account.
across social continua in heterogeneous ways. Several authors have already suggested that different social groups may have
their own communicative styles, just as speakers of different languages use distinct linguistic forms to convey their experi-
ence of reality (cf. Eckert, 2000; Cheshire, 2005; Milroy and Gordon, 2003; Romaine, 2000). Of course, stylistic variability
across groups will generally be of a quantitative nature, based on distinct communicative preferences rather than on clearcut
differences. This is why quantification and statistical analysis remain useful even if qualitative observation and interpreta-
tion are paramount.
Thus our proposal does not deny the existence of correlations between linguistic variables and social or situational fea-
tures, but aims to interpret them in quite a different light. Choosing some variant in interaction entails choosing to commu-
nicate what that variant means, so it is not just forms that are distributed unequally across social groups, but meaningful
choices as well. In this view, it should be emphasized that each syntactic form can contribute particular social and situational
values to discourse, resulting in stylistic meanings that should be the real object under analysis in any case of variability.
2. On the cognitive foundations of communicative styles
2.1. Variation, meaning and cognition
From the preceding discussion it should be inferred that any further development of variationist research on morphosyn-
tax will require approaching grammar from an eminently semantic perspective. This will mean setting aside the traditional
requirement of descriptive or referential sameness and viewing differences in meaning as the way to explain the existence of
formal variation (Aijón Oliva, 2006a,b; Serrano, 2010, 2011). For this reason, we see current cognitivist approaches to gram-
mar as offering the most fruitful path to the development of a theory of variation.6
First, it must be acknowledged that even though all sociolinguistic approaches are centered on the role of the speaker as
user, little is yet known about the real motivations leading speakers to select certain variants instead of other possible ones.
The relationship between speaker and usage has been poorly investigated, due to the predominance of behavioristic views
(see Section 1.2): speakers are supposed to linguistically act according to their social status and to the communicative sit-
uation. In particular, variationism has tended to study closed and purportedly homogeneous categories of individuals who
will predictably show different frequencies with respect to the same variable. There is no explanation on why the linguistic
system should allow and even perpetuate the uneconomic existence of several options to (supposedly) convey the same
meaning, let alone on why certain types of interactions and certain sociodemographic traits of speakers seem to trigger
the use of some linguistic forms instead of others. However, the findings of recent studies are paving the way towards a
theoretical model of variation in natural languages in which style is understood as a process of meaning construction
(cf. Serrano, 2010). There has no doubt been an important evolution from the earlier insistence on variant descriptive
synonymy through the incorporation of discursive and pragmatic considerations and the interactional perspective. But
the support of a general linguistic theory to explain findings on variation is still needed. This can be accomplished thanks
to the development of the cognitive paradigm (cf. also Serrano, 2011).
Cognitive linguistics is partly a return to the view of language as meaning and communication, and explicitly rejects for-
malism and modularism. It is based on principles such as that language cannot be detached from the whole set of human
mental activities and that linguistic form is indissolubly linked to content (cf. Langacker, 1991, 1999; Gibbs, 1996, p. 31;
Croft and Cruse, 2008, pp. 18–20). The fundamental symbolic nature of language grants meaning a central place in linguistic
research, with grammar being a set of symbolic units for the expression of ideas in linguistic form (Cuenca and Hilferty, 1999,
p. 185). This makes it possible to approach variation as an inextricable blend of grammatical and semantic-pragmatic ele-
ments, starting from Langacker’s (1987) view of grammar as a continuum of symbols organizing conceptual content.
From this viewpoint, linguistic variation will be deemed as reflecting and at the same time shaping an extralinguistic real-
ity that is perceived as variable, diffuse and ever-changing; forms in alternation will never have exactly the same meaning,
even if they might seem to in a superficial semantic analysis. In this sense, variation would embody the mental categoriza-
tion of human experience. The expressive choices made by speakers are hardly random, nor do they have merely psychoso-
cial implications, but rather entail a particular way of configuring reality through discourse.
Thus a scientific explanation for variation should build on general principles of human cognition and of the way it devel-
ops through interaction with the physical environment and with other members of the species (cf. Aijón Oliva and Serrano,
2010). Furthermore, since variation is ubiquitous in those contexts where language is acquired, it can be hypothesized that
linguistic and communicative competence might incorporate a fundamental probabilistic component (Bresnan and Hay,
2008), but this is one of a number of complex questions that will only be ascertained through extensive research.
On the path to an explanation of grammatical variability and usage in Spanish we have found some perceptual notions to
be particularly useful, namely those of salience and informativity of discursive entities. These seem to be gradual rather than
discrete notions measuring the relative relevance achieved by referents in any stretch of discourse (Beaugrande, 1980,
6
However, the line of research outlined here is not analogous to that of so-called cognitive sociolinguistics. The hermeneutic process followed by the latter
starts from notional or conceptual cognitive categories and observes their social arrangement, whereas our aim is to validate empirically observed syntactic and
sociostylistic variation by taking cognitive grammar as its explanatory basis.
chapter IV, Fillmore, 1977, p. 75; Grimes, 1975, p. 281). Some elements are more salient for the participants, that is, they are
more firmly anchored and activated in their shared cognitive context, while others are introduced as relatively new
information or are just confined to the perceptual background. All this seems to be tightly related to a great variety of formal
features of discourse. As will be shown in the following sections, these concepts have so far been successfully applied to the
analysis of a number of Spanish variable syntactic phenomena.
In sum, such an approach to discourse and cognition can endow the study of variation with an internal explanatory basis
that will make it possible to understand its functioning and, especially, the complex and subtle meaning effects that may be
achieved by selecting a given form instead of others (cf. Talmy, 2000). Semantics, just as pragmatics, is a fundamental com-
ponent of grammar, which again points to the adequacy of cognitive hermeneutic approaches for analyzing linguistic vari-
ation. The integration of all levels of language across general mental principles will result in a vision of all so-called internal
and external correlations as ultimately related and globally explainable by resorting to such principles.
2.2. State of the art. The present contribution
The rapprochement between cognitive and communication linguistics has become obvious in recent times through
the incorporation of fieldwork and empirical data to some formal studies. Such a confluence of perspectives was expect-
able, since cognitivism shares many basic interests with sociolinguistics and the study of variation (Dirven, 2005, p. 39).
In fact, many authors have seen their junction as inevitable (cf. Kristiansen and Dirven, 2008, p. 2). As early as in 1999,
Langacker pointed out the need to extend the cognitive approach to the field of discourse. Since this paradigm is based
on the analysis of meaning and use, it should naturally broaden its analytical scope to all areas of human communica-
tion where meaning plays a relevant role (Kristiansen et al., 2006, p. 3). A view of linguistic structures as representing
cognitive models, based on the conceptualization of physical experience and of the relationship with others, can help
explain not only those structures but also their usage, traditionally seen as little more than a succession of empirical
data. Such a junction of perspectives and tools is probably the greatest current challenge for both cognitivism and vari-
ationist linguistics.
Recent studies on syntactic variation from a cognitive viewpoint are those dealing with the use of the Dutch adverb er
‘there’ (Grondelaers et al., 2008), adjective variation in two varieties of the same language (Speelman et al., 2008) and par-
ticle movement (Gries, 2001). As regards stylistic variation proper, we could cite Kristiansen’s (2008) study on style shifting
and accent perception from a sociocognitive perspective. The theoretical tenets of cognitive linguistics may well be applied
to syntactic and stylistic variation in Spanish as they have to other languages, and it is through such an approach that we
intend to provide the study of variation with some explanatory ground, establishing a link between formal and functional
aspects that are most often regarded independently. The major challenge for future research will be to shape a theoretical
model that can reconcile all levels affected by variation (formal, semantic-pragmatic, discursive, sociostylistic) on the basis
of the general mechanisms of human cognition (cf. Aijón Oliva and Serrano, 2010). All this favors an integrated sociolinguis-
tic approach that in no case will contemplate the social and linguistic dimensions separately (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz,
2007).
To illustrate some empirical projections of the theoretical principles exposed, in the remainder of this paper we will sur-
vey a number of cases of syntactic variation in Spanish and some of the stylistic values that can be inferred from their anal-
ysis. As remarked before, in order to explain such values we will tentatively resort to the cognitive notion of salience,
understood as the perceptual relevance an entity achieves in a scene or event described by means of language (Croft and
Cruse (2008, p. 73)), as well as to the informativity referents are loaded with (Lambrecht, 1994, p. 273). Discourse is unde-
tachable from the physical and psychological context in which it is produced, and it tends to reflect the relative importance
accorded to participants and any other entities. It seems that salience can project itself on any level of linguistic structure,
from the most external (the pragmatic-discursive) to the most internal ones (the phonological-prosodic). Here we intend to
show and discuss a few of its many repercussions on morphosyntactic variation.7
3. Some examples from Spanish
3.1. Variation in verbal clitics
Starting from Finegan and Biber’s (2001) approach to style as an effect of the functional communicative demands of the
situation, it has been possible to confirm the relevance of stylistic factors on morphosyntactic variation, and specifically in
the paradigm of Spanish verbal clitics as used in mass media language. Aijón Oliva (2006a, p. 671, 2006b) assumes that it is
7
The excerpts and data for the analyses have been taken from the following corpora: Corpus of Mass Media Language of Salamanca (MEDIASA) (Aijón Oliva,
2006a); Conversation Corpus of Canary Islands Spanish (CCEC); and C-Oral-Rom (Moreno Sandoval, 2005). The first one comprises both radio and written press
texts from a Spanish central town: the domain of mass communication proves very useful for sociostylistic analyses of this kind, offering a wide range of
interactions among different kinds of speakers. The second one is a corpus of both conversational and mass-media oral texts from Canarian speakers. Finally, C-
Oral-Rom is an oral public corpus based on conversations among different speakers from Madrid.
not only the frequency of a formal variant that varies according to the situation, but also that of the internal and external
factors that tend to co-occur with it. However, the notion of functionality handled by Finegan and Biber appears to apply
mostly to mechanical features of the communicative situation conditioning formal aspects of variation, such as lexical diver-
sity or syntagmatic complexity. On the other hand, the possible discursive and cognitive values of variation seem to be ex-
cluded from the quantitative analysis. Aijón Oliva believes that such values, far from hindering the analysis of formal
variability, may indeed be the key to its interpretation since (as assumed by the cognitive approach; see Section 2.2. above)
any change in form entails a change in meaning.
In these studies, clitics are viewed as morphemes signaling object agreement, this being a relatively original feature of
Spanish among Romance languages. Such agreement is generally optional for non-pronominal indirect objects postposed
to the verb:
1. Yo (le)i entregué los documentos al secretarioi

‘I gave (him)i the documents to the secretaryi’
Variable agreement does not alter the descriptive content of the clause and is thus suitable for variationist analysis, even
if both variants do not seem to convey exactly the same at the discursive and cognitive levels. Aijón Oliva isolates the main
internal conditions co-occurring with the presence vs. absence of the clitic, as well as observing the relative frequencies of
the variants according to social groups and textual genres. In general terms, non-agreement can be said to be most typical of
higher social levels and written, informational genres. The author notices an almost stereotypical preference for non-agree-
ment in news headlines, which he suggests may have been originally due to the necessity of saving page space, but in the
long run has come to characterize all journalistic informational discourse, even when there is no such necessity (2006a, p.
683). This would support Finegan and Biber’s hypothesis that functionally motivated linguistic traits end up by acquiring
social meanings as they become associated to the groups that use them more often, so social variation could be said to derive
from situational variation.
Moreover, the author also finds some interesting facts from an interactional viewpoint. There seems to be a higher fre-
quency of non-agreement in contexts where the person or people referred to by the indirect object are being criticized or
looked down on, while the opposite applies to contexts where such referents are portrayed in a positive way. This suggests
that variable object agreement in Spanish could constitute a resource for (im)politeness.
2. Con todo respeto Ø pido a los periodistas que toquen temas de su especialidad o que conocen en profundidad y no se
metan en camisas de once varas. <Car-Ad-170504-6>
‘With all due respect, I ask Ø journalists to stick to topics of which they have sufficient knowledge, instead of seeking
trouble’
3. Juan por ejemplo Ø recrimina al alcalde/que::-/que en fin/que:- que esté todo el día/e:/dice aquí ‘‘toCANdo las
narices” con el asunto de-/del Archi:vo o de la Casa Lis <Var-SE-211204-13:55>
‘For example, Juan blames Ø the Mayor for being all the time, he says, screwing around with affairs such as those of
the Archive or the Casa Lis’
This is not meant to say that expression of the clitic would not have been possible in these examples, it obviously is; but
the quantitative and qualitative analysis of real texts shows a tendency for controversial contexts like these to prefer the
forms signaling lesser salience. The potential for (im)politeness of each variant seems to stem from their differing interpre-
tations. Clitics signal the importance granted to their referents in discourse and perception. Their presence marks a rise in the
perceptual salience of their referents, as is shown by their much higher frequency when referring to human beings and to
definite and thematic entities (cf. Givón, 1976); in fact, they are categorical when the corresponding noun phrase is formu-
lated as a personal pronoun. Thus salience proves to be the most useful concept to explain variation in the use of verbal clit-
ics as much as its stylistic values (cf. Section 2; Aijón Oliva, 2006a). This would explain why speakers (intuitively) choose this
variant more often in positive or flattering contexts, or when they intend to downplay a threat on the image of the referent
(see Table 1). Whereas a traditional correlational approach would try to ascertain which of these different interactional and
cognitive factors is responsible for the choice of non-agreement, we believe they may all be present and relevant at the same
time: they are all meanings created at different levels by a single choice of the speaker. It is also interesting to note that
politeness does not seem to be linked to stylistic formality, since the more usual variant in so-called formal and written sit-
uations (non-agreement) is at the same time the one generally used to signal confrontation or social distance.
Table 1
Relationship between variable object agreement and interactional strategies.
Strategy Agreement Non-agreement Total

Dignification 59 (53.2%) 52 (46.8%) 111 (73.5%)
Pejoration 16 (40%) 24 (60%) 40 (26.5%)
Most of what has been said is applicable to other phenomena related to Spanish clitics, such as the choice between accu-
sative and dative forms to mark the agreement of a direct object (4) or the choice between preposition (or climbing) and post-
position of clitics when they are adjoined to verbal periphrases (5).
4. Ayer (los/les) vi por la calle

‘Yesterday I saw them (acc./dat.) on the street’
5. Voy a matarte/Te voy a matar
‘I (you) am going to kill (you)’
Dative forms and preposed clitics are the variants more typical of human and highly salient referents, and also seem to be
the ones preferred when trying to avoid interactional threats, whereas their counterparts suggest objectualization. As for the
first of these phenomena, in (6) we can see an accusative clitic los (instead of the alternative les) used in a face-threatening
context. On the other hand, in (7) the dative les is chosen to politely address the hearers of a radio program8:
6. <EP> es demasiado buen actor/como para especializarse en este tipo de películas más comercia:les (...)
<ASW> es verdad siempre: los: criticas un poco por esto <Var-SE-300503-19:40> (2006b, pp. 237–238)
‘–He’s too good an actor to specialize in such commercial films... – That’s true, and you always criticize them (acc.)
for that’
7. Ya saben que todos los días tenemos la misma intención/informarles/si es posible al mismo tiempo entretenerles
<Var-Co-230503-12:30> (2006a, p. 415)
‘As you know, it is always our intention to inform you (dat.) and, if possible, to entertain you (dat.) at the same time’
As for clitic placement in periphrases, in example (5) above most speakers tend to perceive a stronger menace with post-
position (Voy a matarte), whereas preposition is more likely to be interpreted as ironic or playful. Similarly, in (8) we see that
the speaker, trying to avoid the suggestion that he might be intending to give his interlocutor any lessons, preposes the clitic
referring to the latter:
8. Lo que yo pretendía decir don Alberto que no es cosa que le quiera esplicar porque la ha entendido usté
perfectamente/es que <Var-Co-230503-12:50> (2006b, p. 226)
‘What I meant to say, Mr. Alberto – and it’s not that I (to you) intend to explain it, since I know you have perfectly
understood – is that. . .’
In the reviewed studies, the frequency of a variant in a given context is linked to a particular stylistic intention (be it so-
cially indexed or not) and thus variability can be considered an interactional resource going beyond the mere numerical dis-
tribution of variants. Such a conception of stylistic variation clearly overcomes traditional classifications along the formality/
informality axis by encompassing several different dimensions and analytical levels. It supports the idea that linguistic var-
iation, and more specifically non-phonological one, is not simply a descriptive matter of frequency distribution with no qual-
itative implications, but a much broader and general phenomenon strongly affecting grammatical structure and textual
organization.
3.2. Passive structures with ser ‘be’
Variation between active and passive structures is one of the first phenomena to have been studied when the
Labovian method was extended to syntax (cf. Weiner and Labov, 1983; Casanovas, 1999, p. 242). Carter and McCarthy
(1999, p. 45, 57) carry out an inquiry on variation between English get- and be passives in spoken discourse (e.g. My
dog was run over by a truck/My dog got run over by a truck), which they see as an interpersonal and interactive phenom-
enon with some semantic and notional distribution. The study reveals the existence of implications beyond syntactic
structure: there are semantic–pragmatic differences involved in the choice of get vs. be, such as the affective intent of
the speaker, who tends to use get to convey more problematic or adverse circumstances. On a more abstract level, it
could be said that be passives focus on the event, while get ones stress the speaker’s or other participants’ involvement
in it. In English, the passive has been exhaustively studied9; on the other hand, in Spanish it remains a poorly understood
construction, not just from a correlational variationist perspective, but even more so from the discursive-pragmatic, inter-
actional and sociostylistic ones.
Grammatically as well as notionally, passive structures – as opposed to their active counterparts – can be regarded as
communicative strategies for the raising of a semantic object to the syntactic position of the subject, which involves an
8
In fact, the dative is almost categorical in the corpus when addressing the second person, though not third ones (2006b, p. 236).
9
Cf. Downing (1996), Givón & Yang (1994) and Gronemeyer (1999).
increase in its perceptual salience, manifested mainly through verbal agreement. The patient of the event gets discur-
sively thematized and becomes the main perspective from which such an event is regarded. Conversely, the agent will
generally be introduced in discourse as new information, that is, it will be more informational but less salient (cf. Givón,
1990, p. 563; Fernández, 2004). It has often been shown that sentence-initial position tends to imply the highest cogni-
tive salience, since those elements placed at the beginning are considered the most crucial ones and have the power to
condition the interpretation of the remainder of the clause (cf. Virtanen, 2004, pp. 84–88; Fried, 2009).
9a. Juan compró la casa

‘John bought the house’
9b. La casa fue comprada por Juan
‘The house was bought by John’
It follows that the passive could be used as a stylistic resource to highlight the salience of the patient of an event.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Spanish grammar generally allows for the patient to be thematized without a
change in its syntactic function; such is the case with La casa la compró Juan ‘The house John bought it’, with the coref-
erential clitic establishing object agreement with the verb and thus also stressing the salience of its referent.10 This sug-
gests that the variable under consideration may not be limited to the mere choice between active and passive, and that
deeper insight would be needed to ascertain the complete array of variants available, as well as the factors promoting
the choice of one over the others. One of the most common and serious criticisms of quantitative sociolinguistics is based
on its somewhat arbitrary way of formalizing variables and its supposition that the variants are in complementary distri-
bution. It is no easy task to elucidate all the elements or structures that could possibly have been formulated in some con-
text (cf. Preston, 2001).
Due to this, in the current state of knowledge it seems more cautious to merely count the total occurrences of passive
structures across texts and investigate whether there may exist any relationship with situational and stylistic factors. That
is, passive usage will be considered in absolute rather than relative terms. Such a procedure has already been adopted in
works like those of Dines (1980), Macaulay (2005, 2009) or Aijón Oliva and Serrano (forthcoming).
That the Spanish passive is related to patient thematization is substantiated by the fact that, out of 179 items in the MED-
IASA corpus, 169 (94.4%) have their subject preposed to the verb or, in some cases, as the head of a relative clause. Figs. 1 and
2 show that the distribution of passive structures across the different written and oral media genres in the corpus is clearly
uneven:
However, this could obviously be an effect of the unequal word number of the genres included in the corpus. So, in order
to better ascertain the relative weight of the construction in each genre, the average number of items per 10,000 words is
calculated. This statistical index makes it possible to objectively compare the distribution of the structure in all genres, as
shown in Tables 2 and 3.
This shows that the ser passive is much more frequent in written than spoken language; in fact it is often deemed a
stereotype of written media language by Spanish speakers. This would seem to make it a characteristic feature of
journalistic talk. It is also particularly remarkable that more than half of the passives in the written corpus appear in
news items.
10. La víctima era un hombre de 73 años que fue atropellado por un turismo en la avenida Alfonso XIII . . . la calle Padre
Ignacio Ellacuría fue el escenario de una colisión entre un turismo, conducido por M.C.B.S., y un ciclomotor,
pilotado por O.S.G., que resultó herido grave y fue trasladado al Hospital Clínico <Not-Ad-170504-13>
‘The victim was a 73-year-old man who was run over by a car on the Alfonso XIII avenue. . . Padre Ignacio Ellacuría
Street was the scene of a crash between a car, driven by M.C.B.S., and a moped, ridden by O.S.G., who got severely
injured and was carried to the Clinical Hospital.’
The passive in Spanish is most likely a cliché of textual genres tending to the informational rather than to the interactional
pole of communication. With its thematization of a former object, it contributes to textual cohesion and continuity. Given
that it is journalists that are most often responsible for such texts in the domain of the media, it may be no wonder that
the structure have come to be associated to their speech as a professional group. Again a precedence of situational factors
over social or group ones might be pointed out, but it must be added that the former seem in turn to be based on cognitive
values.
In sum, the use of passive structures with ser constitutes an instance of syntactic variation as a means to create styles,
based on the perceptual meaning of the raising of an object-patient, by which it is granted a more thematized and salient
status. Similar discursive–cognitive values had previously been identified by Delbecque (2003, pp. 373–374), who believes
that passive structures provide speakers with a higher degree of subtlety and variety in the configuration of participant roles
than their corresponding active structures. They embody a notional viewpoint that can be metaphorically termed upstream
and whose goal is to reduce the transitivity of the clause.
10
We must also mention a quite characteristic construction of Spanish, the so-called reflex passive, in which the third-person reflexive clitic se is used to mark
an inanimate subject as patient while blurring the presence of the agent: La casa se compró ‘The house was bought’. Even though its parallelism to the ser
passive is obvious, it also has important formal and semantic peculiarities which cannot be dealt with extensively in the present paper.
Opinion 22 16%
Stories 20 15%
Letters 13 9%
Interviews 5 4%
News items 76
56%
Fig. 1. Passive structures in written press genres.
Ads 2 5%
Magazines 15
Sports 5 11%
35%
News reports 15
35%
Music 6 14%
Fig. 2. Passive structures in radio genres.
Table 2
Frequency index of passive structures in written genres.
Written genres Frequency index

Opinion pieces 7.3 (22)
Letters to the editor 8.6 (13)
Interviews 3.3 (5)
News items 12.7 (76)
Stories 6.6 (20)
Total count 9.1 (136)
Table 3
Frequency index of passive structures in oral genres.
Oral genres Frequency index

Advertisements 1.3 (2)
Sport programs 1.4 (5)
News reports 8.3 (15)
Music programs 2.9 (6)
Magazines 2.4 (15)
Total count 2.8 (43)
3.3. Functional marking of relatives
Relative heads are subject to certain variable phenomena that can be accounted for with regard to stylistic and discursive-
cognitive factors. As is known, besides introducing their subordinate clause, relatives perform a syntactic function inside it.
This grammatical category has in fact inherited some traits of Latin declension even if the morphological case marking
that can still be glimpsed across the paradigm (que ‘who, which’, quien ‘who’, cuyo ‘whose’, donde ‘where’, etc.) is being
progressively replaced by syntactic means, namely the adjoining of prepositions: a quien ‘to who’, con quien ‘with who’, etc. It
is worth noting that when a relative functioning as an indirect object is not accompanied by the standard mark for this func-
tion in Spanish (the preposition a), it becomes necessary to resume its referent inside the relative clause with a coreferential
clitic (11b). Such a clitic is however merely optional when the preposition appears (11a).
11a. Vino una mujer a la que (le) habían robado un bolso

‘A woman came from whom a handbag had been stolen (from her)’
11b. Vino una mujer que (*Ø/le) habían robado un bolso
‘A woman came that a handbag had been stolen from her’
The clitic assuming the marking function of the preposition has sometimes been called pleonastic or resumptive (cf. Aijón
Oliva, 2006a, 272). Relatives seem to be undergoing a grammaticalization process whereby they get progressively deprived
of their pronominal character and become mere subordinating conjunctions:
12. Un estudiante (al) que solo le faltaban dos asignaturas para acabar la carrera (Brucart 1999, 404)
‘A student (for) who just two more courses were needed for him to get his degree.’11
Since it is relatives functioning as clause subjects that never bear any prepositions, we could venture that the non-standard
formulation of an objectual relative without them is an indication that its referent possesses a higher salience than what is
most typical of objects. The categoricity of clitic agreement could also be a sign of this value, since agreement with the verb
seems to be one of the main manifestations of the higher cognitive prominence of syntactic elements (cf. Sections 3.1 and 3.2).
The lack of case marking can be most easily perceived in restrictive clauses where the norm states it should go with the
relative que, as in the following example:
13. Y/l- hay gente/Ø que: a lo mejor no le gusta verse retratada en:: según qué situaciones <Var-SE-300503-19:25>
‘And there are people who it’s not pleasing to them to be portrayed in certain situations’
In many cases the phenomenon is motivated by the fact that the same preposition has already appeared next to the ante-
cedent and so its repetition could seem superfluous:
14. Ha habido cambios en la formació:n/en el momento que tengamos más:-/más detalles/os comentaremos <Mus-40-
220803-10:40>
‘There have been some changes in the band. . . At the moment which [instead of at the moment at which] we get
more news, we’ll let you know’
Just like the results of the passive showed, the frequency of unmarked relatives bears some relationship to communica-
tive modes and textual genres, as can be inferred from the statistical distribution displayed in Table 4.
The low frequency in written media language of a non-standard variant like the absence of prepositions is not surprising.
But it should also be pointed out that subordinate relative clauses in general are more abundant in written discourse,
whereas orality is known to generally prefer coordination and juxtaposition to subordination. As for written press genres
(Table 5), the closer we get to the prototype of written informational communication, which would be represented here
by news items and stories, the more frequent the functional mark becomes. Conversely, the lowest proportion is obtained
by interviews, probably due to the fact that these texts are mostly transcriptions of oral conversations. Argumentative genres
like opinion pieces and letters to the editor achieve intermediate results.
The tendencies for oral genres may not be as clearcut, but the general results seem to allow for the same conclusions. Case
marking is especially frequent in those radio programs where informational and highly pre-planned segments are predom-
inant, such as news reports and magazines. On the other hand, music programs achieve a high percentage of unmarked rel-
atives as broadcasters generally seem to seek a more spontaneous, casual style. Fig. 3 condenses the values obtained by
written vs. oral genres as for the functional (un)marking of relatives.
The shortage of unmarked relatives in some oral genres such as news reports, sport programs or commercials is partly
attributable to the low frequency of relative clauses themselves in those genres. All data seem to indicate that the variable
under scrutiny is related to the stylistic differences between prototypical orality and literacy, just as it constitutes a resource
in itself to construct stylistic meanings in accordance with the characteristics of both communicative modes. When the func-
tional mark of a relative is suppressed, the referent signaled by the relative becomes more cognitively salient and this may
condition the informational and interactive values of discourse. Further analysis of this phenomenon in conversational cor-
pora could lend support to the previous statements.
3.4. Variable expression and placement of subject pronouns as an (im)politeness strategy
As is known, the formulation of subject pronouns is generally optional in Spanish: Yo digo/Ø digo ‘(I) say’. Their appear-
ance in the clause iconically stresses the discursive-pragmatic status of their referent as the protagonist of the event de-
11
What is more, in exclamatory constructions such as ¡El calor que hace! ‘So hot that it is!’, the relative seems to act as a mere indicator of exclamatory
modality (Brucart, 1999, p. 487).
Table 4
Frequencies of functional marking of relatives in written genres.
Written genres Functionally marked Functionally unmarked

Opinion pieces 31 (91.2%) 3 (8.8%)
Letters to the editor 14 (93.3%) 1 (6.7%)
Interviews 15 (78.9%) 4 (21.1%)
News items 100 (99%) 1 (1%)
Stories 33 (100%) 0
Total count 193 (95.5%) 9 (4.5%)
Table 5
Frequencies of functional marking of relatives in oral genres.
Oral genres Functionally marked Functionally unmarked

Advertisements 1 (50%) 1 (50%)
Sport programs 9 (75%) 3 (25%)
News reports 15 (100%) 0
Music programs 8 (57.1%) 6 (42.9%)
Magazines 46 (80.7%) 11 (19.3%)
Total count 79 (79%) 21 (21%)
200 Marked relatives

180
Unmarked relatives
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Written genres Oral genres
Fig. 3. Marked and unmarked relatives in written and oral discourse.
scribed, thanks again to the cognitive property of salience. Given that pronouns embody the perceptual presence of entities
in a mental scene, we might hypothesize that an express subject will be more salient to the speaker than a non-express one,
insomuch as it will be more clearly activated in the context (cf. Serrano and Aijón Oliva, 2010a).
Spanish grammar also allows for the variable placement of the subject, especially in declarative clauses. Rhematic ele-
ments, which tend to be placed to the right of the clause, are at the same time those less deeply rooted in the perceptual
landscape, so the position of the subject as regards the verb might also be meaningful. When postposed (Lo dije yo ‘It said
I’), its perceptual salience will be smaller, but at the same time it will usually bear a higher informational load, the thematic
position being occupied by the object clitic. The contrary obtains with preverbal subjects (Yo lo dije ‘I it said’), these being
more topical and salient, but less informational in the context. In sum, the presence vs. absence of the subject, as well as
its placement with regard to the verb, are likely to affect the style of the sentence and hence its meaning.
Combining both facts we could imagine a scale from lowest to highest perceptual salience of subjects, as inversely pro-
portional to their informativity: postverbal subject > preverbal subject > omitted subject. This is further elaborated in
Table 6.
The subject is thus a syntactic function that always embodies some notional perspective of events. The speaker’s mind
structures the scene by way of semantic–pragmatic factors that reflect underlying cognitive schemata (Croft, 1991, p. 99).
In fact, the speaker is believed to give priority to some elements of the scene, including or excluding certain participants from
it (Fillmore, 1977). The preverbal/postverbal placement of the subject and its expression/omission constitute formal variants
that may be socio-communicatively distributed, leading to the creation of different meanings like those related to linguistic
(im)politeness (cf. Section 3.1). Some previous studies had already suspected the existence of such stylistic values. Llorente
Maldonado (1977, p. 110) noted that the suppression of the subject in impersonal sentences with the clitic se may constitute
a strategy of conversational politeness in some cases. Haverkate (1987) points out that, in such sentences, the speaker be-
comes an indirect participant and so prevents his/her own person from being focused on.
Table 6
Salience and informativity of the subject according to its formulation.
Subject Example (‘I come’) Cognitive salience Informativity in discourse

Postverbal Vengo yo salient +informative
Preverbal Yo vengo ±salient ±informative
Omitted Vengo +salient informative
In this initial survey we will only try to check if the quantitative distribution of preverbal and postverbal subjects in con-
versational texts can bear any relationship to socio-pragmatic and stylistic politeness functions. We start from the hypoth-
esis that the different degrees of cognitive salience suggested by preverbal or postverbal subject placement should
pragmatically affect the interpretation of the referent’s image either by diminishing potential threats on it (mitigating or flat-
tering politeness) or by reinforcing such threats or simply not amending them (impoliteness) respectively. We have analyzed
several texts from two of the aforementioned corpora: Conversation Corpus of Canary Islands Spanish (CCEC) and C-Oral-
Rom, collecting 540 items of express subject pronouns (either preverbal or postverbal).
The results indicate that the postverbal position seems to convey objectualization of the subject and hence a decrease in
the flow of energy between the subject and the object.12 Thus postposition indexes a perception of the subject as less agentive
and more of a dative or beneficiary, following the natural tendencies of syntactic objects (Dixon, 1979, p. 152). In order to ac-
count for intransitive clauses, agentivity could be reformulated more generally as foregrounding within the clause (Wårvik,
2004, 102). A postposed subject such as in ¿Está usted bien? ‘Are you OK?’ is less salient than in the alternative ¿Usted está bien?
‘You are OK?’ (cf. also Serrano and Aijón Oliva, 2010b).
Such is also the case with example (15), taken from a narrative monologue in which the speaker refers to an indirect par-
ticipant that functions as the argumentative content of indirect speech. The objectualization and the lesser salience of the
postposed subject result pragmatically in the maintenance of the threat on its referent. This may constitute a strategy to
reinforce the contentious orientation of the text, since the informative focus is placed on the referent.
15. Ven porque ha llamado la señora de Peña/que/Emilia ya no le interesa//y eso yo lo sabía//se lo dije a la tía
Magdalena digo/cuando encuentre personas/la va a largar// (. . .) pues cuando me fui yo/me lo hubiese dicho usted a
mí también/eh? o cuando yo vine aquí me lo hubiese dicho usted/ a mí también/yo me la llevo y no la tiene usted
que despedir//luego no le dio la liquidación. . . bueno/tuvimos una disputa por teléfono. . . vamos discutí con ella y
se lo dije//Magdalena/me dijo dice/no te deberías de callar//no te deberías de callar//porque lo ha hecho muy mal//
y después de estar tú tanto tiempo/haciéndole un servicio (. . .) (C-Oral-Rom <efammn08>)
‘Come here, because Mrs. Peña just called, saying she’s no longer interested in Emilia. I’d seen it coming. I told aunt
Magdalena, I say, ‘When she finds other people she’ll give her the boot. . . Well, when I left, you should have told me
too, right? Or else when I came here you should have told me too, so I could have taken her with me and you
wouldn’t have had to fire her.’ Later she didńt give her the settlement. Well, we quarreled on the phone, I had an
argument with her and I told her. Magdalena said, ‘you shouldn’t keep your mouth shut, because she’s been really
unkind, specially after you have been serving her for so long’’
In turn, preverbal subjects may help mitigate or tone down an a priori controversial content, especially when compared to
the postverbal alternative. Placement before the verb is the most frequent solution with Spanish subjects and also seems to
be typical of human and thematic referents regardless of their syntactic function. It indexes an increase in the cognitive sal-
ience of the subject – whose agentivity is stressed – as well as a decrease in its informational focalization, and thus may help
dignify the image of its referent at a socio-pragmatic level.
For instance, in texts like (16), taken from a meeting of workers in which there is little interaction with the audience, pre-
verbal subjects can be found in the most controversial segments of the text, with the implicit goal of dignifying the image of
nosotros ‘us’ by iconically stressing its role in the positive actions carried out. The thematic position, aside from conveying
higher salience and agentivity of the subject, moves the informational focus away from it.
16. Las cuestiones que Ø planteamos n que se unificarán todas en un escrito son las siguientes //necesidad de igualar el
régimen normativo de convivencia en el centro ||| nosotros habíamos planteado que/estuvieran presentes el
coordinador del centro y el coordinador de Tenerife, pero. . . (. . .) nosotros presentamos un escrito|||en finntuvimos
una segunda asamblea (. . .) nosotros en esa reunión no teníamos noticia de que eso era legal (CCEC <ElTra0108>)
12
By this we are alluding to the so-called canonical event model (Langacker, 1991, pp. 285–286), an archetypal cognitive schema comprising two main roles,
those of the agent and the patient. The former is the source of energy and executes a volitive action, causing a change of state in the latter. This schema is based
on the prototypical semantic roles of grammatical functions (subject-agent, object-patient) and serves as an archetype for the coding of those mental scenes
that languages tend to develop as basic-type clauses (Langacker, 2000, p. 43). Agentivity is one of the main semantic manifestations of salience. Even if
Langacker does not explicitly tackle the ordering of elements within the clause, we believe his theoretical model can be used to explain the placement of the
subject, which in adopting the prototypical position of objects undergoes a decrease in its agentivity together with a rise in its informativity or focalization.
Preverbal subjects
(CCEC)
Preverbal subjects
(C-Oral-Rom)
Dignifying
Pejorative
Postverbal subjects
(CCEC)
Postverbal subjects
(C-Oral-Rom)
0% 50% 100%
Fig. 4. Distribution of interactional strategies according to the preverbal/postverbal placement of subject pronouns.
‘The questions (we) are raising, which will all be gathered in a document, are the following. First, the necessity of
generalizing the norms for coexistence in the center. We suggested that both the center coordinator and the one in
Tenerife be present, but. . . We submitted a document and held a second meeting. . . At the time of that meeting we
were not aware that that was legal.’
Fig. 4 summarizes the general data for preverbal and postverbal subjects in both corpora under scrutiny. There is a fairly
clear association between preposition and dignifying interactional strategies, as well as between postposition and pejorative
images of the referent. This again makes it possible to conclude that the cognitive properties of syntactic structures can be
contextually projected on stylistic meanings.
4. Conclusions
In this paper we have argued for an approach to syntactic variation that takes into account both its cognitive foundations
and the possibilities these offer for the creation of stylistic meanings in social interaction. Adopting a cognitive viewpoint
along the lines exposed means accepting that whenever we speak we choose not only the form of a message, but also its
content. When some linguistic structure is formulated instead of other possible ones, a particular orientation of the utterance
is being selected at the same time. Perceptual notions such as those of salience and informativity, here seen as gradual in
nature, help explain the existence and usage of the grammatical forms reviewed here, which due to their intrinsic meanings
can contribute to the construction of communicative styles in interaction.
Variable object agreement by means of verbal clitics is the first phenomenon in which we have shown how perceptually
meaningful variants allow for different communicative styles to be shaped and sociosituationally distributed. Non-agree-
ment is most typical of written and informational discourse – the types of communication evolving mostly around objects
– and it also tends to characterize the style of professional communicators and writers. In an interactional level, it seems to
be a potential resource for impoliteness. All this can be theoretically related to its indexation of lesser salience of the entities
involved in discourse. Much the same can be said as for variation in clitic placement in verbal periphrases and as for the
choice between accusative and dative clitics: there seems to be a fundamental connection between cognitive categories, sta-
tistical distribution across social and stylistic continua and interactional usage.
The rise of a semantic object to the syntactic position of the subject also illustrates how differences in perceptual salience
engender different meanings that are in turn transformed into stylistic strategies. In passive constructions with ser, the pa-
tient gets thematized and becomes the most salient element in the clause. These structures constitute a productive stylistic
resource in mass media texts, again probably due to their typical association to written and highly planned communication.
Similarly, variable case marking of relative heads helps establish differences between oral and written genres, which in turn
give rise to socially and situationally specialized styles.
Finally, preverbal vs. postverbal placement of pronominal subjects also reflects varying degrees along the perceptual
scales of salience and informativity. A preverbal subject will be perceived as more salient than a postverbal one, whereas
the latter will tend to constitute the informational focus of the clause. Again we have been able to find some relationship
between this variable phenomenon and interactional (im)politeness, with subject preposition being preferred for positive
or flattering contexts. Our findings substantiate the possibility of developing a theory of politeness centered on internal
grammatical aspects, this being a scarcely explored direction so far (cf. Kasper, 2009, p. 165).
In sum, formal variants are not (as long posited by the mainstream variationist view) different ways to say the same,
which should in fact be a theoretical impossibility, but rather different ways to say different things (Halliday et al., 1968;
Beaugrande and Dressler, 1999, p. 103).13 Styles are the different ways to shape, organize and communicate what is in the
mind of speakers. Our concept of linguistic style is quite far from a neutral consideration of variables and variants in the tra-
ditional Labovian fashion: the alleged need to view variants as synonymous becomes senseless in light of the most recent the-
ories on style and syntactic variation. What really needs to be undertaken from this point on is the analysis of different ways of
speaking, as had already been proposed from ethnographic sociolinguistics (Hymes, 1974).
Thus one of the many suggestive facets of this new approach to variation is the chances it will offer to contrast commu-
nicative styles from different speech varieties, based on the social distribution of the meanings that stem from variation. The
choices made by speakers in the course of interaction simultaneously affect all internal and external levels of meaning. It will
be the task of future research to elucidate the essential discursive and cognitive dimensions differentiating between styles, as
well as the linguistic variants that embody such dimensions and the nature of their co-occurrence patterns, following some
of the lines suggested in this study.
Role of funding sources
Research project entitled: ‘‘Los estilos de comunicación y sus bases cognitivas en el estudio de la variación sintáctica en
español” (FFI2009–07181/FILO), funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.
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Syntactic variation and communicative style

Article in Language Sciences · January 2011

María José Serrano Miguel Ángel Aijón Oliva

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Language Sciences 33 (2011) 138–153

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Syntactic variation and communicative style

1. The sociolinguistic concept of style

1.1. Style and sociolinguistic structure

1.2. Style and interaction

1.3. Style and syntax

2. On the cognitive foundations of communicative styles

2.1. Variation, meaning and cognition

2.2. State of the art. The present contribution

3. Some examples from Spanish

3.1. Variation in verbal clitics

1. Yo (le)i entregué los documentos al secretarioi

Strategy Agreement Non-agreement Total

4. Ayer (los/les) vi por la calle

3.2. Passive structures with ser ‘be’

9a. Juan compró la casa

Fig. 1. Passive structures in written press genres.

Fig. 2. Passive structures in radio genres.

Written genres Frequency index

Oral genres Frequency index

3.3. Functional marking of relatives

11a. Vino una mujer a la que (le) habían robado un bolso

3.4. Variable expression and placement of subject pronouns as an (im)politeness strategy

Written genres Functionally marked Functionally unmarked

Oral genres Functionally marked Functionally unmarked

200 Marked relatives

Fig. 3. Marked and unmarked relatives in written and oral discourse.

Subject Example (‘I come’) Cognitive salience Informativity in discourse

Role of funding sources

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