The address system in the Spanish of the Golden Age

Abstract

This paper describes the address system in the Spanish of the end of 16th and the beginning of 17th centuries and tries to give an interpretation of this system on the basis of works such as Brown and Gilman (1960), Lakoff (1973, 1977, 1979), Brown and Levinson (1978, 87), Hill et al. (1986) and Ide (1989). The data has been extracted from a corpus of several plays from the Spanish Golden Age. Speakers of Spanish from this period choose among three different pronouns: TÚ, VOS and VUESTRA MERCED. In this paper, we observe all dyads that occur in the selected corpus, and describe how they usually work on the basis of the two following variables: power and intimacy. First, analyzing how society expects address to be between two particular interactants is important to us. The description of these expectations is the description of the socially encoded polite rules of the period, which coincides with Ide's definition of discernment (see Hill et al., 1986). However, we also have to bear in mind that in some interactional situations, the speakers choose their address pronouns according to the volitional aspect of politeness, because showing affection, solidarity or some kind of emotion to the addressee is more important to the speaker than following the socially encoded rules. Many usages of pronouns are even due to momentary emotional situations between the speaker and the hearer. The choice of the pronoun becomes a game with a strategy to get certain objectives from the hearer or to show certain feelings towards the hearer. The differentiation between two different aspects of politeness; discernment and volition, introduced by Hill et al. (1986) for Japanese, can also be applied to the study of Spanish Golden Age address system. According to Brown and Gilman (1960), until the 19th century, power semantics prevailed. However, according to the data extracted from our corpus, we can move back the date when solidarity semantics starts to work in Spanish. It seems that in Spanish both solidarity semantics and power semantics are working simultaneously, but applied to different interactional contexts.