Assertive strategies in English and Spanish: a new contribution to the debate on assertion in Romance and Germanic languages

Abstract

Our paper analyses the way English and Spanish speaking informants build textual cohesion in a narrative task involving a non-prototypical information flow. The results are compared with those of Dimroth et al. (2010) in order to enlarge the debate about the “assertion oriented” and the “non-assertion oriented” languages. We shall demonstrate that a strict distinction between the Romance non-assertion oriented pattern, on the one side, and the Germanic assertion-oriented pattern, on the other side, is not possible and that this opposition, as for other phenomena, it is to be interpreted as a continuum rather than a contrast. Furthermore, we shall satisfactorily explain this result by an enunciative framework of analysis, thanks to which the semantic and linguistic choices that an enunciator makes are not simply seen as the expression of grammaticalization processes but rather as the reflex of (unconscious) decisions motivated by his/her communicative needs with respect to a specific co-enunciator