Agenda

Edita Gutierrez-Rodriguez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid):

Concealing uno (‘one’ in Spanish): (in)definiteness and person agreement

The form un(o)/una ‘one [masc./fem.]’ when it appears with a null noun (Leonetti 1999 among others) has three main interpretations in Spanish: the existential reading (1), in which uno can be paraphrased by alguien ‘someone’; the arbitrary or generalizing reading (2), where uno means ‘everyone, including the speaker’; and the referential or concealing reading (3), in which uno means the speaker. As shown in the examples below, the latter two are used to include the speaker without mentioning it:

(1)    Uno me ha dicho que van a cancelar el concierto
(2)    Uno debe ser feliz
(3)    Se va haciendo uno viejo. Estas cosas me hacen efecto

Arbitrary and concealing uno don’t share the same syntactic contexts, even though both are mechanisms to avoid direct mention of the speaker. The concealing reading occurs with episodic predications, while the arbitrary reading appears in generic contexts with imperfective tenses, individual predicates, deontic contexts, etc. (RAE/ASALE 2009, Gutiérrez & Pérez 2023). 
In this talk we will focus on the concealing uno. In this use uno refers exclusively to the speaker, even if it is a 3rd person nominal phrase, as shown by the agreement with the verb when it is the subject of the sentence: 

(4)    Me cuesta hablar de mis sentimientos, una {puede/*puedo} hablar con más facilidad de los ajenos 

However, it also behaves as a 1st person personal pronoun, that is, a non-quantificational referential definite pronoun. In the example above, una ‘one [fem.]’ has the same referent as the 1st personal pronouns me ‘me [dat., 1st person]’ and mis ‘my [poss., 1st person sing.]. This grammatical behavior is similar to that of imposters, described in Collins & Postal 2012, Collins (2014).
We will describe the contexts in which uno departs from the behaviour expected of a 3rd person indefinite and resembles in its grammatical properties a 1st person personal pronoun, hence a definite determiner phrase. For example, referential uno is incompatible, like personal pronouns and proper names, with restrictive relative clauses (Gómez Torrego 2013: 17):

(5)    Uno que ya está harto de todo solo piensa en dimitir (*concealing/arbitrary)
(6)  Uno, que ya está harto de todo, solo piensa en dimitir (concealing)

To explain these properties, we propose that uno in the concealing reading rises from a position below D where the indefinite determiners originate to D (Longobardi 1994, Zamparelli 2000), thus acquiring the properties of a definite non quantificational determiner.

Edita Gutiérrez-Rodríguez is a professor of Spanish at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her main fields of study are Spanish grammar and the teaching of grammar as a first language. Her study of Spanish grammar has focused on the nominal projection, in particular, nominal phrases with weak quantifiers. As for the teaching of grammar, it is worth mentioning her participation in the design and writing of the Glosario de términos gramaticales, published in 2019.

The conference will be presented in Italian and English.