“Iscrevu esta carta so para bosemese saber”: a deixis social em cartas Romenas e Portuguesas da Grande Guerra

Abstract

"“I am writing this letter only for you to know”: Social Deixis in Romanian and Portuguese Letters from the Great War. This paper analyses the use of address forms in letters from World War I written by Romanian and Portuguese soldiers, with the objective of comparing the discursive configuration of the interlocutive distance (Carreira 1997) in the two languages. The analysis, based on online and printed corpus reveals systematic similarities between the two languages concerning nominal address forms: the frequent use of intensity markers (possessives, qualificative adjectives, vocatives, diminutives) to express affection towards the recipients. There are differences concerning the use of pronominal address forms. Parent-son relationships are asymmetrically constructed in both cultures, which is reflected by the use of intermediary pronouns você and dumneata, but in husband-wife correspondence only the pronoun tu is used in Portuguese, while in Romanian letters both tu and dumneata appear. In the correspondence between friends and colleagues there are some differences: the pronoun tu is used exclusively in Portuguese, while in Romanian there is an alternation between tu and dumneata. Overall, this study shows that interlocutive distance was higher in Romanian than in Portuguese at the beginning of the 20th century. Keywords: Portuguese Address Forms; Romanian Address Forms; Epistolary Writing; War Letters; World War I "