La variación intra-hablante primera persona singular vs. tercera persona singular como formas de autorreferencia en el discurso del presidente Evo Morales

Abstract

In this thesis we offer an analysis of the intra-speaker morphosyntactic variation of the first person singular vs third person singular as forms of self-reference in a corpus made up of political speeches and journalistic interviews of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The research problem was approached from the perspective of linguistic variation; In particular, we have carried out an analysis based on the theoretical-methodological postulates of the Columbia School of Linguistics theory. With our analysis, we show that the alternation in the use of the forms of 1s and 3s is not due to chance or a merely stylistic selection, but rather responds to the communicative needs that the speaker has in terms of making explicit different modes of self-presentation in speech. In contexts in which he needs to emphasize his leading role, his particular responsibility or his singularity, Evo Morales favors the form of 1s, taking the least distance from the self-presentation that he evokes in his speech. On the contrary, when he tries to mitigate his protagonism, dilute his responsibility, differentiate himself from a conceptualization that was made about him, then he takes the greatest distance by selecting the 3s form. From the different parameters with which we have correlated our dependent variable, we have realized that distance is that congruent relationship that is established between the meaning of the form and the context that nests it. In all the factors that intervene in the selection, what underlies is precisely the distance as orientation. Thus, we have considered different parameters that constitute different modalities or versions of distancing.