Diachronic research on address in Portuguese and Spanish

Perceptions of Forms of Address in European Portuguese in Online Metadiscourse or What Happens When You Use você in Court

“…In both cases (either by dropping você or by dropping a nominal form), the third-person pro-drop remains as an avoidance or zero-form tactic to some extent but loses its value of neutrality if we accept that it needs to be indexed to an expressed subject, which the speaker is attempting to elide. This brings us back to the concept of 'crisis' that Hummel (2020) applies to systems of address-what the EP system seems to evince to a great extent is the search for sensible solutions that seem very hard to find. The polarised conceptualisations of address uncovered in this study point to a need to find appropriate forms to fill the T, the V and certainly the N dimensions, but, with the exception of tu in the T dimension, there are no clear answers.…”

“…The complexity of intervening factors in systems of address (regional variation, identity, features of reverence, respect, formality, in/out-group) has also prompted Hummel (2020) to posit 'crisis', defined as 'searching for solutions', as a useful approach in address, and a defining feature differentiating it from other linguistic functions or forms. The address system in EP seems to be in crisis insofar as its complexity illustrates a search for solutions which have proven difficult to find-perhaps nothing illustrates this as well as the current pragmatic complexity of the address pronoun você, the pronoun that warranted the reprimand to Jorge Jesus.…”

“…Você is the result of the grammaticalisation of the nominal form Vossa Mercê, which also explains why it maintains grammatical agreement with thirdperson forms despite its second-person semantics. This seeming grammatical inconsistency is fully echoed in the variegated pragmatic effects of você, which, on the one hand, may lend itself to interactions where a fairly neutral, socially distant form is necessary or to situations where speakers may wish to avoid the T pronoun tu whilst maintaining an equality-based address occupying a middle ground between intimacy and distance (Cintra 1972;Hummel 2020). However, on the other hand, você is often seen as an intrinsically impolite pronoun, potentially causing offence and often avoided for the same reason (Carreira 2004;Duarte 2011;Guilherme and Lara-Bermejo 2015;Hammermüller 2004;Lara and Guilherme 2018;Nascimento et al 2018;Oliveira 1994Oliveira , 2009.…”