Forms of address as a strategic activity and as an index of categorization within societies of approximation or distancing

Abstract

The objective of this work is to describe similarities and differences in the address forms in non-polite acts formulated by university students from the cities of Córdoba (Argentina) and Sao Paulo (Brazil), which favor the use of extrinsic politeness. We will analyze, specifically, nominal, pronominal and vocative forms, used in directive acts for personal benefit (requests) and non-preferred responses (rejections) as linguistic procedures for pragmatic attenuation. As discursive-argumentative strategies, we will analyze how the forms of treatment serve the purposes of approximation - or non-distancing - social of the interactants, in the search for the balance of the images. As it is a corpus formed by university students' statements, the address forms, which we will work, will be the informal ones corresponding to each of the speech communities: você (São Paulo, Brazil) and vos (Córdoba, Argentina). The different formulas that pass between the gradation of greater or less colloquiality in each of the cities will also be indicated. Our hypothesis is that such differences and similarities will allow us to record important data for the categorization of each of the speech communities in the continuum proposed by Haverkate (2004) and Briz (2007) of approximation and distancing societies. We emphasize that this work is part of an intercultural research developed within the methodological parameters of the project Es.Por.Atenuación, which establishes the theoretical framework for the realization of both comparative studies between Spanish and Portuguese, as well as the different regional variants of each of those languages.