Variable use of plural address forms in Andalusian Spanish

• Main Author: Jaime Jimenez, Elena
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2018
• Subjects: Address forms; Comparative linguistics; Conditioning; Education; Formality (Language); Grammatical agreement; Grammatical mood; Inference; Interpersonal relations; Language; Language attitudes; Linguistics; Males; Person; Polls & surveys; Pragmatics; Priming; Pronouns; Rural areas; Sociolinguistics; Spanish language; Verbs
• ISBN: 9780438813465; 0438813464

In Central and Western Andalusian Spanish, both pronominal and verbal variation are found in the use of plural address forms (Lara Bermejo 2015). The pronominal variation involves alternation between the 2PL pronouns ustedes and vosotros as subjects, e.g. ustedes coméis and vosotros coméis 'you (plural) eat'. The verbal variation involves the alternation between the 2PL and 3PL verb forms when ustedes is the subject pronoun, e.g. ustedes coméis and ustedes comen 'you (plural) eat'. Previous work addresses pragmatic differences between these variants only in terms of contextual (in)formality and (a)symmetric interpersonal relationships, arguing that there are no pragmatic differences between the variants (Alvar 1973; Lara Bermejo 2015; Narbona et al. 1998). Building upon prior research on pragmatic differences between singular address forms (Raymond 2016; Sinnott 2010), in this study I show that plural address form variation in Andalusian Spanish is likewise closely tied to pragmatic differences. I collected a total of 7,852 tokens from online fora, from Twitter, and from the corpus PRESEEA Málaga. Data also come from an oral elicitation task and an online forced-choice survey with different types of contexts. Data were analyzed using multivariate logistic regression in R, random forests and conditional inference trees. Results indicate that pre-verbal as opposed to post-verbal placement leads to significantly more use of ustedes over vosotros. Ustedes is also more likely to occur in non-neutral contexts, as shown by the contexts from the elicitation task and online survey, and by the co-occurrence of ustedes with graphic features like emojis in the online sources. Furthermore, ustedes is more frequently produced by males, lower education speakers, and speakers from rural areas. Imperative mood and priming lead to more use of the 3PL verb form over the 2PL with ustedes. This dissertation reveals that use of the 3PL with ustedes is limited to formulaic expressions of the type juzguen ustedes 'you guys be the judges'. It also reveals that ustedes plus the 2PL verb form follows the pattern of its predecessor vuestras mercedes, 'your honors', which also occurred in pre-verbal position more frequently and with second person agreement instead of third person agreement before it was fully stabilized in the system (Fernández Martin 2012). This pattern suggests a possible change in progress, supported by the association of ustedes with males, lower education, and rural areas, as well as with priming, which has been identified as conditioning obsolescing linguistic elements (Rosemeyer & Schwenter 2017). Furthermore, ustedes with the 2PL or the 3PL, as opposed to vosotros, conventionally implicates non-neutrality, where the specific attitude toward the interlocutors is context-dependent. This study therefore sheds new light on pronominal shifts in Spanish, which are typically assigned to static social categories (cf. Raymond 2016). It shows how address form switching is used by the same speaker in the same interaction to convey distinct pragmatic meanings. More generally, it contributes to the analysis of plural address forms, which are highly understudied from a cross-linguistic perspective.