Chapter 12
Formality by distance in Spanish and Catalan
Unlike the pragmatic literature, a pronoun’s ability to distinguish levels of formality has received relatively little dedicated attention in the syntactic literature. One definition of formality from the politeness literature defines it as social distance (Brown & Levinson 1987). We take the idea that formality can be viewed as distance literally and argue that second-person pronouns can incorporate Harbour’s (2016) projection, χ, that encodes spatial semantics. Variation in second-person pronouns results from differences in each language’s specific pronominal resources and the social meanings they are assigned.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Second-person pronouns in Spanish and Catalan
- 3.On person and number
- 4.Spatial deixis, vicinities and pronouns
- 5.The proposal
- 6.Morphology
- 6.1A sampling of formality in Spanish and Catalan
- 6.1.1Standard Peninsular Spanish
- 6.1.2Standard Latin American Spanish
- 6.1.3Salvadoran Spanish
- 6.1.4Catalan
- 6.1.5Cuban Spanish
- 7.Conclusion
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Notes
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References
