Building spaces for the Spanish second-person singular <i>tú</i> viewpoint

Abstract The second-person singular tú in Spanish usually extends its reference to the speaker as well as to the audience, turning into a communicative resource that invests the content with an objective meaning. This investigation analyzes the linguistic elements that help to construct the second-person singular tú as an objectivizing viewpoint. To create such a viewpoint space builders play an essential role. Their function is to create a cognitive viewpoint of the event, placing the content on an imperfective temporal axis which provides it with a regular and continuous meaning. The infinitive, the clitic se , unspecific NPs, the pronoun uno and temporal markers cuando and si are the space builders considered to promote the objectiving meaning of the second-person singular tú .