Morgan and Schwenter (2016, 2018) showed that Romance languages with both singular and plural T/V pronouns are asymmetrical, in that the use of the plural V forms is consistently less frequent and more constrained than the corresponding singular forms. For example, Castilian Spanish speakers, who have the vosotros (T) and ustedes (V) distinction in the plural, often select the T form when the group of addressees is mixed between T/V in the singular, and may even do so when all the individuals in a group would be addressed as V in the singular.

Here, we examine two seemingly intractable cases for this research: European Portuguese (EP) and Romanian. In EP, speakers often use “descriptive pronouns” (Amaral 2019), 3PL NPs employed as 2PL V forms, as in Os pais querem café? (“Do you [the parents] want coffee?”). Speakers also use an “avoidance” strategy in the plural: since both the T (vocês) and the V pronoun (os senhores, os pais, etc.) are conjugated as 3PL, speakers can and often do “opt out” of choosing a pronoun. Romanian, like French, allows a 2PL pronoun (and 2PL conjugation) to do double duty as a 2SG V form, but the paradigm is further complicated by two additional 2PL pronouns, one of which variably takes 2PL or 3PL verbal morphology. These facts, together with the null subject preference found in certain contexts in Ibero-Romance, rendered previous results unconvincing. For both EP and Romanian, therefore, we designed a new survey instrument, recasting the address forms in the scenarios as objects of prepositions, where pronoun avoidance would be ungrammatical.

Our results permit more accurate comparisons with the other Romance languages analyzed previously. We illustrate with added clarity that, despite the other options available in EP and Romanian, both languages show asymmetries similar to those uncovered in their Romance brethren.

References

• Amaral, Patrícia. 2019. Descriptive pronouns. In Secondary content: The linguistics of side issues, ed. by Daniel Gutzmann and Katharina Turgay. Leiden: Brill.
• Morgan, Terrell A. and Scott A. Schwenter. 2016. Vosotros, ustedes, and the myth of the symmetrical Castilian pronoun system. In Inquiries in Hispanic Linguistics: From Theory to Empirical Evidence, ed. by Alejandro Cuza, Lori Czerwionka, and Daniel Olson, pp. 263-280. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Morgan, Terrell A. and Scott A. Schwenter. 2018. Romance evidence for linguistics universals in pronominal address. Paper presented at the 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Toronto, Ontario, 25-28 April 2018.