Personal and non-personal forms of address in three contiguous Romance languages: sociolinguistic approach and gender implications

The proposed research project focuses on second-person address forms (e.g., tu/vous in French) and non-personal strategies that avoid any reference to the addressee (e.g., impersonal constructions) in three contiguous standard languages: European Portuguese, Peninsular Spanish, and French from France and from Belgium.

Address forms provide information about a number of features related to the interlocutors (age, sociocultural level, gender, etc.), the type of relationship they share (e.g., close friends vs. distant acquaintances), and their relative social roles (e.g., boss vs. employee).

Therefore, analysing these forms may reveal social differences in terms of hierarchy or distance that show inequalities.

In spite of the existence of relatively similar forms, due to their common Latin origin, the use of the address forms differs across the three languages.

Indeed, the literature has not yet provided a full picture of the use of these forms because of their variability in speech and the many factors that influence which form is chosen.

DE-PERSONAlisation aims to fill this void with an empirical approach based on a triangulation of methods and a combination of natural and elicited data from five different sources.

The project seeks to establish for each language a sociolinguistic correlation (quantitative analysis) between the use of each form of address (including non-personal strategies) and the contextual and sociolinguistic variables of speakers and addressees, focusing on their gender, since little attention has been paid to this variable in research on these languages.

Furthermore, concerning the non-personal strategies, an innovative pragmalinguistics study is carried out of which types are used (qualitative analysis) in relation with these variables.

Finally, the project includes a multi-contrastive analysis between the three languages to show common and different patterns of use, focusing on the importance of the participants gender variable.