Address in Portuguese and Spanish

The volume Address in Portuguese and Spanish. Studies in diachrony and diachronic reconstruction edited by Martin Hummel and Célia dos Santos Lopes provides the first systematic contrastive approach to the history of forms of address in Portuguese and Spanish. For this purpose, the volume joins the most relevant authors on this topic. The state of the art established in this volume will thus be a landmark for further research. Since nearly all studies on address in Portuguese and Spanish have been published in languages other than English, this book will allow the international scientific community to get in closer touch with this topic. As far as Portuguese and Spanish are concerned, both languages are intimately related, especially in the case of address, because the crucial moments in the history of address happened in shared political and geographic contexts (e.g. Philipp II of Spain and Philipp I of Portugal were the same person; colonization of America). Consequently, the new dialogue between research on Portuguese and Spanish promises new insights. To give one example, empirical data show that the puzzling late spread of Pt. você and Sp. usted (polite usage of third person singular) over America can be explained for both languages by the role of the political and military colonial administration. From the methodological point of view, the volume is innovative insofar as it links traditional historical analysis with historical reconstruction based on present-day variation. The volume includes theoretical reflections as well as fine-grained empirical studies. Part I includes three papers that shed light on the direct comparison of address in Portuguese and Spanish from different perspectives: theory and methodology, contrastive dialectology used for historical reconstruction, and historical reconstruction via in corpora composed by personal letters. Part II includes three studies realized in the framework of the PHPB (Project for the history of Brazilian Portuguese) on the basis of private letters written between 1900 and the end of the 20th century, as well as a pioneering study that explores for the first time the rich dialect data collected in Portugal by Manuel de Paiva Boléo between 1930 and 1965, a study that again allows for new insights by means of diachronic reconstruction. Part III tackles innovative topics on address in Spanish: The loss, marginalization or local conservation of second plural vosotros (plural you) and the possessive vuestro (plural your) in America. Address in the context of usage and prescriptive norm in Argentina. The micro-history of two presidential debates in Mexico, the European roots of the alleged Americanism su merced (lt. His/Her Mercy). The expansion of tuteo (use of informal singular you) in Spain between 1875 and 1939.