“…Moreover, the diachrony of writing reflected by a corpus is often supposed to be equivalent to the diachrony of the whole language without discussing the orality-literacy interface.2 Obviously, grammaticalization theory can be developed towards a more differentiated analysis. In this sense, Sáez Rivera (2006Rivera ( , 2013Rivera ( , 2014aRivera ( , 2014b analyzes whole texts, takes into account all variants, suggests studies on dialects,3 and includes, as far as possible, the differentiation of oral and written traditions. But only a metalinguistic commentary from the beginning of the 18th century provides the insight that usted had become the spoken variant for written v.m., the abbreviation of vuestra merced (Sáez Rivera 2006: 2904.…”