Personal uno in Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish

The pronoun uno ‘one’ in Spanish is known to have an impersonal use (RAE 2005). Less well-known is the use of uno to refer to ‘self’, mainly, the speaker. Some studies have noted this alternation of uno with first person personal pronoun yo (e.g. Toribio 2000; Gelabert-Desnoyer 2008; Flores-Ferrán 2009) and yet its precise referential status remains uncertain. The corpus results from the present study suggest that uno referring to the speaker is far from being scarce in either more colloquial or formal contexts. Following Gelabert-Desnoyer (2008), two main types of uno are identified: impersonal uno (UNOgen) and self-referential uno. The latter is subdivided into two subtypes: (i) uno referring only to the speaker (UNOyo) and (ii) uno referring to the speaker plus other potential referents (UNOyo+). I claim that these different types of uno emerge from two factors: (a) the focus placed on the speaker’s standpoint and (b) the potential domain of reference.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe