Why and how tú in three plays by Calderón

Abstract

Spanish second-person pronominal forms are well known to vary according to factors such as familiarity and social status. There are few quantitative investigations of social factors contributing to this variation in seventeenth-century Spanish. This article offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of second-person pronominal forms in three plays by the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright, Pedro calderon de la Barca, El medico de su honra, El pintor de su deshonra and A secreto agravio, secreta venganza. A qualitative analysis shows that terms of address vary according to socio-economic class, gender and relationships between characters. A quantitative multivariate analysis explores their effect on one pronominal form, tu. Results reveal that the importance of social status is mitigated by relationships within the same family and household.