Una busca llena de esperanzas... The uno and una variation in Argentine Spanish

Abstract

In this paper we present an immersion in the analysis of two linguistic forms of defocused self-reference that alternate in the discourse emitted by women: uno and una. From our perspective, the alternation is not random, nor does it merely respond to the gender of the speaker, as it has traditionally been described, insofar as both forms are found in intra-speaker variation in female discourse. Consequently, we seek to discover what factors influence the selection. In that search, the analysis of our literary corpus, from a qualitative and quantitative methodology, allows us to assert that themes related to female experience favour the occurrence of the form una, in the contexts in which the stereotype is reproduced.