A variable cognitive and communicative resource in Spanish: The first-person plural subject and object

- First-person plural subject and object are meaningful choices cognitively grounded.
- Constructions with either first-person subject or object will convey different ways of encoding the referent.
- First-person plural subjects and objects are resources to shape different communicative styles in discourse.
- Variants are unequally distributed across textual genres.
- First-person plural subjects and objects create styles based on the +/−objectivity dimension.

This study analyzes the variation of the Spanish first-person plural subject and verbal object nosotros (we); nos/a nosotros-(us/to us) within a corpus of contemporary Spanish, (Corpus Conversacional del Español de Canarias, CCEC) from a cognitive theoretical framework, that has been revealed to be very useful for studying syntactic variation and the meaning that variants convey, making it possible to analyze variants as a continuum of formal and semantic-pragmatic elements that reflect the human perception of reality. The gradual dimension of cognitive salience has played an important role to conceptualize the relative relevance of participants in communicative interaction. The subject and the object in the clause are regarded as reaching different degrees of salience. The inherently diffuse nature of the Spanish first-person plural reference together with the different degrees of salience of subject and verbal object make the omission the most frequent variant, whereas the expression is rather infrequent. Results reveal that subject and object variants are used according to the nature of the textual genre and therefore create communicative styles based along the cognitive dimension of +/− objectivity axis.