The politeness of você in European Portuguese

Abstract

Abstract The employment of você in current European Portuguese is not clear. Although Brazilian Portuguese has specialised it as an informal pronoun in certain geographical areas within the country, the European variety presents its use in contexts which seem to be contradictory: informal address, formal address and pejorative address. Due to the lack of an in-depth study on the evolution of this form, we have collected data from three different corpora that reflect the real usage of você throughout the twentieth century, since it is from the nineteenth century that você started specialising as an informal pronoun. The results show a decreasing use of this pronoun and a certain degree of polyvalence due to a gradual marginalisation experienced for over one hundred years. As a consequence, the strategy of null subject plus 3sg has emerged as the unmarked politeness strategy in current European Portuguese.