What is it about?
How we address an interlocutor in Spanish or Portuguese (tú, usted, vosotros, vos.../você, vomecê, vocês...) is surely a significant sociolinguistic variable, due to a complex repertoire of linguistic forms and an intricate interplay of communicative intentions. The logic of variation in both languages - both grammar and norms of usage - is revealed with implicational scales in several selected case studies.
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Why is it important?
The purpose of this study is twofold. On the one hand, it shows that there is rhyme and reason in the apparently chaotic variation of linguistic address in Spanish and Portuguese in terms of both the grammatical forms employed and the communicative intentions exchanged by the interlocutors. On the other hand, the same implicational logic articulates how specific grammatical forms are chosen and how those forms are used in different conversational situations.
Perspectives
Linguistic address has usually been considered an important but intimidating aspect of Spanish and Portuguese. High levels of apparently unpredictable variation characterize the grammatical patterns, while determining the accurate number of norms in the different speech communities has turned out to be a quite difficult or even impossible task. This paper shows that all the relevant properties of those patterns, grammatical or pragmatic, yield equally to the logic of scalar implications in a natural way.
Miguel Vázquez Larruscaín
University of Southeastern Norway
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Comparativa de los tratamientos hispano-lusos, Revue Romane Langue et littérature International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures, January 2026, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/rro.23007.vaz.
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