'Tu', 'vos', and 'vuestra merced': Social and stylistic variation in Medieval Spanish

The diachronic study of the Medieval Spanish precedent for the Spanish American voseo (the non-deferential use of the formerly deferential address pronoun of vos) has lagged behind the synchronic description. Previous treatments of the development of deferential address in Medieval Spanish have lacked a coherent approach to documentation and have tended to treat each address form in isolation. The method of this dissertation consists of a combination of theoretical approaches to the study of address forms with special emphasis on Brown and Levinson's (1987) sociolinguistic politeness theory, a careful consideration of the relevant factors of the medieval socio-political history, and a survey of several genres of non-literary and literary texts arranged chronologically from the 10th to the 15th centuries.Chapter 1 surveys general notions of address systems and the theoretical approaches to their study. Chapter 2 explores the Greek and Latin manifestations of deferential direct address with emphasis on the social and cultural changes in the Late Roman Empire that were reflected in linguistic change. Chapter 3 outlines the major events and institutions in the socio-political history of medieval Spain that have explanatory value for the proliferation and extension of deferential address forms throughout the society. Chapter 4 covers non-literary documentation: notarial documents, legal codes, letter-writing formularies, letters, grammars, and Santillana's collection of proverbs. In Chapter 5 the following literary texts were selected for their abundant inclusion of dialogue: lyric poetry, epic poetry, religious poetry, the Libro de buen amor, and didactic prose.The sociolinguistic conclusions of my study, that the participants in communicational dyads were as interested in identifying themselves as they were their addressees, and that women were the primary facilitators of reciprocal deferential address forms, are drawn from my analysis of lyric and epic poetry and didactic prose. The morphological and syntactic particulars of the incorporation of deferential address into the linguistic system are especially well documented in the letters and the lyric poetry.The results of my study reveal the social and linguistic situation in Spain at the close of the 15th century to have been one of escalating employment of ever more deferential direct address. I conclude that it was particularly in the speech of women that a preference for reciprocal deferential address forms was carried to the New World and firmly installed in the intimate contexts of family and community relations.