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.
