Referential ambiguity in discourse - generalizing ´you´

Apart from its use as forms of address, French tu and Spanish t can be used in a generalizing sense, similar to French on, Spanish uno and se, or German man. Thus, tu (or their polite forms, vous/usted) refer not to the listener, but to `anybody in this situation`, thereby achieving a generalizing effect. While French possesses a grammaticalized impersonal pronoun, on, to compete with generalizing tu/vous, Spanish uno/una or se do not have the same status. In this research project I want to analyze the use of generalizing you in French and Spanish, with special emphasis on the sociostylistic variation. I propose a corpus-based, crosslinguistic, comparative analysis, taking as a main corpus the Spanish and French subcorpora of C-ORAL-Rom, the new reference corpus (Cresti/ Moneglia 2005). Other corpora of a greater diatopic and/or diachronic diversity will be added as need be. Most studies either focus on forms of address, considering generalizing you as atypical cases, or focus on generalization strategies, beginning their analysis with French on or Spanish uno and se. However, the interplay between forms of address and generalization strategies might just explain the apparently growing importance of generalizing T/V forms. There are many mechanisms at work that are still not well understood, for instance, why speakers commit very few errors of interpretation. I therefore plan to combine an onomasiological and semasiological approach, starting precisely from the neglected 2nd singular. To trace the spread of generalizing you across different registers along time, I propose to add a diachronic perspective by also working with the database of Frantext. French as a non-pro-drop language is suited better for such a search than Spanish. Spanish shall be the language of choice in which diatopic and diaphasic differences shall be analyzed in detail, using the questionnaire method, among others. Again under a semasiological perspective, I want to compare a translation of an English text into French, Spanish, Portuguese and German to analyze co-variation of generalizing T/V with other strategies of generalization like on/uno/una/a gente/man, se, ils/ellos/eles/sie, je/yo/eu/ich, nous/nosotros/ nosotras/nos/wir, hay etc. Finally, as a general theoretical frame, I shall test two theories: Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory.