Referring to discourse participants in European Portuguese: The form of address o senhor

Abstract

We will examine the uses of the noun phrase o senhor (formal ‘you’), as well as its linguistic and discourse status. As a form of address, it has acquired features that are typical of pronominal forms of address, with bleaching of semantic traits that point to an ongoing process of grammaticalization. In European Portuguese, despite being an issue that has been addressed several times, a comparison of the existing theoretical explanations has yet to be accomplished. Furthermore, its usage has not been analysed in different discourse contexts so as to attest to these changes. It is therefore necessary to revive and broaden the discussion. The data we have employed in this analysis is taken from the corpus Perfil sociolinguístico da fala bracarense (‘Sociolinguistic profile of Braga speech’), consisting of sociolinguistic interviews. We also built an ad hoc corpus, comprising political debates and interviews. In addition, for specific questions, some data was obtained from the CETEMPúblico corpus, and from the Davies & Ferreira corpus for diachronic data. The overall goal of this study is the analysis of the linguistic and discourse features of the address form o senhor. It is a qualitative approach, complemented by quantitative analysis of the occurrences recorded. The results of our study show that o senhor is a hybrid form of address, revealing features from the two categories, the nominal form of address and the pronominal form of address. The confrontation of diachronic and synchronic data shows that the semantic values of the noun affect the current pragmatic values of the forms of address (FA).