Cognition and communicative style: postverbal subject and syntactic object

Abstract

Cognitive salience and textual informativeness are tools revealed as very important in determinating the meaning created by syntactic variants in discourse. According to that we analyze three possible constructions of postverbal subject and object (VSO, VOS and OVS) in some oral texts from the Corpus Conversacional del Español de Canarias which comprises both mass media genres and spontaneous conversations. Results indicate that the most frequent variants are VSO and OVS being respectively used in mass media texts and spontaneous conversations. The former conveys an epistemic meaning helping to shape an objective style more suitable to be performed in mass media genres. Contrarily, the OVS variant showed up a deontic meaning which tends to create a more subjective style.