Generic uses of the English pronoun one and the Spanish pronoun uno in parliamentary debates

Impersonal pronouns one in English and uno in Spanish are described in the literature as functionally similar, combining two meaning components: first-person orientation and generalization. However, their generic uses remain understudied both in the domains of semantics and pragmatics and from a comparative perspective. This study aims to identify similarities and differences in the distributional patterns of generic uses of one and uno in English and Spanish and to establish the role of the generic component of One -impersonals in cross-linguistic correspondences. We adopt a parallel corpus approach (Gast 2015), and conduct a comparative analysis of English one and Spanish uno , drawing on insights from the research on genericity, specifically, the distinction between rules (established norms and regulations) and inductive generalizations (inferences based on observed facts). Using data from the Europarl corpus, our analysis demonstrates that while the frequencies of generic versus non-generic uses are comparable across languages, the distributional patterns of generic uses differ significantly. For generic statements with English one , rules strongly prevail over inductive generalizations, whereas Spanish shows no statistically significant distinction between these categories. For both languages, social rules are more common than other types of rules (moral, legal, biological, and metalinguistic). In Spanish, equivalent contexts of English sentences with one show underrepresentation of first-person forms in generic contexts. Conversely, English equivalent contexts for sentences with uno show underrepresentation of the pronoun you in first-person oriented non-generic uses. The study contributes to better understanding of the generic uses of English one and Spanish uno and reveals their interpretive asymmetry, thereby providing new knowledge of their semantic and pragmatic features.