Variación en el empleo de la 1° y la 3° persona del singular en el discurso de Evo Morales

Abstract

In this article, 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 conformed by political speeches and interviews made to the president Evo Morales. The approach to the problem was made from the perspective of linguistic variation and from the theoretical-methodological postulates of the Columbia School linguistics. With this analysis we demonstrated that the alternation in the use of the forms of 1 st and 3 rd is not due to chance, but responds to the communicative needs of the speaker in order to explain different ways of self-presentation in the discourse. In contexts where he needs to emphasize his protagonism, his particular responsibility or his singularity, Evo Morales favors the form of 1 st by taking the smallest distance to the self-presentation evoked 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 his person, then he takes the greatest distance by selecting the form of 3 rd.