The history of second-person pronouns in European Portuguese

Abstract

European Portuguese is known for the complexity of its second-person pronouns system. Despite this fact, there are not many works that deal with its evolution, since most analyses focus on case studies. In this article, I aim to pinpoint the diachrony of the second-person pronominal system of European Portuguese through the analysis of a corpus consisting of letters that cover the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The data will be compared to the available information regarding the previous centuries as well as the present. The results show that the European variety has journeyed through three very specific periods in its history, triggering both loss of inflection and person disagreements. Moreover, it has always maintained the spectrum of distance or power as the unmarked form of politeness – in contrast to the fashions attested in other languages and elsewhere in Europe.