Chapter published in:
Points of Convergence in Romance Linguistics: Papers selected from the 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 48), Toronto, 25-28 April 2018
Edited by Gabriela Alboiu and Ruth King
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 360] 2022
► pp. 207–222

Chapter 12
Formality by distance in Spanish and Catalan

| York University
| University of Toronto
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.
Keywords: second-person pronouns, formality, Spanish, Catalan, Distributed Morphology, semantics, pragmatics
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
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.360.12bem
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