In this study we examine impersonal pronouns one in English and uno in Spanish on the data from parallel corpora Europarl. While at first sight English and Spanish pronouns seem functionally equivalent fragments, since both can refer either to the speaker’s personal knowledge or to some piece of general knowledge, we demonstrate that this is not always the case and there are other frequent strategies of transmitting the same meaning. We perform the analysis of two samples: (i) parallel contexts with English pronoun one and its Spanish equivalents, and (ii) contexts with Spanish pronoun uno and its English equivalents. The analysis reveals that for English pronoun one the most common strategy of transmitting the same meaning in Spanish is the impersonal construction, while for Spanish pronoun unotwo most common strategies are English pronoun one and the second person pronoun you. Besides, we show that the choice of strategy in both languages is associated with evocation of the speaker’s personal knowledge or general knowledge.
Translated title of the contributionSubject impersonal pronouns one and uno and their equivalents in Spanish and English
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to)18-31
Number of pages14
JournalИностранные языки в высшей школе
Issue number2(73)
DOIs
StatePublished - 19 Aug 2025

ID: 143554941