Michaela Jechova

Pronominal addressing in Catalan and European Portuguese

I would like to present an analysis of two addressing pronominal forms: vós (in Catalan and European Portuguese) and vostè (in Cat.) / você (in Port.), their evolution and current use. The pronoun vós is derived from Latin vos (2nd person of plural), since 4th century used as a respectful form of address to one person, later extended to other Romance languages. The use of the form vós has gradually disappeared from the two analysed languages and is currently rarely used in several specific contexts that I would like to present on the basis of survey results, more precisely V-form vós in Catalan, V-form and T-form in plural in European Portuguese.

The forms vostè/você have derived from Latin vŏstra mercēde. Since the Middle Ages they have undergone grammaticalization, via the Spanish reverential locution vostra merced, to their present forms vostè/você, and they have been fixed in the 3rd person singular. The pronoun vostè is used in Catalan as a V-form to express the distance to the interlocutor, the form você in European Portuguese represents a less formal V-form. Some respondents consider this form to be impolite and rather avoid it; on the other hand, in our results we have observed a slight increase of its use by young people. Nevertheless, the pronominal form você is generally perceived as a controversial form with unsteady usage.

The data were collected by questionnaires (340 Catalan answers, 235 Portuguese answers), through which the pragmatic functions of these forms were analysed. The analysis indicates that the two languages have some of the functions in common (e.g. V-form vós in formal correspondence, in liturgical address, in rural areas in contact with elderly people, with some family members or in literature), but most of them are different (e.g. in school/academic environment). Other interesting results come from an analysis of the digitized texts in the parallel corpus InterCorp regarding the strategies of Catalan translators using the complete tripartite system tu, vós, vostè in their translations.

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