## **3.1** *Hypothesis 1: The use of PL* **vuestro***/***a** *results from its resistance to the overgeneralization/paradigmaticization of* **ustedes***, possibly after SG* **vuestro***/***a** *had resisted the paradigmaticization of* **tú** *for some time*

The scarcity of texts showing references to a plural addressee leads us first to take a look at 2SG pronouns in other texts that were written in colonial Cusco. Here, what stands out most is the frequent use of SG *vuestro*/*a*. Let us consider the following private letter (example (9)) written by a father to his daughter in 1655 (the linguistic forms belonging to the paradigm of *tú* are in italics, while those belonging to SG *vos* are in bold):

(9) Hija de mi corasón: Holgaréme en el alma ésta *te* alle con mui entera salud. La mía es buena para seruir*te* en todo lo que me **quisiéredes** mandar. Digo, hija mía Vrsula de Orellana, *te* doi parte y auisso de que **vuestro** marido al cabo de quinse años a venido a mi cassa a pedirme perdón, que le ha corrido [sic!] tantas desdichas, deue de ser permissión de Dios, pues que por mis puertas se dentró con **vuestro** padrino que *te* cassó, Mateo Arenas, señora Catalina Salinas, *tu* madrina, y assí quiero por uida **buestra** qu[e] *estés* con cuidado, que no me *des* más pesadumbres que las que me *as dado*. Como están cogiendo gente para Chile, por esso quiere ir **vuestro** marido a buscar*te*, si Dios le da salud. Si acasso *te* succediere algo, que ai va el nombre del cura que *te* cassó, don Pedro Cisneros, cura de la yglecia mayor del Cusco. Por la Virgen que *estés* con cuidado; e sauido como muxer fráxil *ayas caído* en alguna desdicha. **Guardaos**, por uida **vuestra**, que me tienes avejentado con las cosas que e [oí]do [de] **vuestra** madre Juana Quispe. *Tu* hermano se metió en San Juan de Dios, el otro *tu* hermano quiere ir a buscar*te*. Ya se fue a Copacabana Antonio Emandes, **vuestro** marido: si acasso *te* hallare **vuestro** marido **agasajaldo** qu'es *tu* espos[o], por la virgen santissima, que los arrieros que venían de Lima me decían que *[e]stauas* […] no *tenías* **vos** la culpa sino es yo que *te* auía echo cassar tan criatura y assi *te* pido no m[e] eches maldición en algún trabaxo, que yo quissiera allarme en algún lado **vuestro** para seruir*te* como hixa mía con lo que vbiere. *Escríbe*me en el primer chasque, a veinte y ciete de dicienbre escrebí esta carta de 1655, y con esto a Dios que *te* me guarde Dios muchos años./A mi hija Vrsula de Orillana. *(Ed. of J.L. Rivarola 2009, Documentos lingüísticos del Perú. Siglos XVI y XVII. Edición y comentario. CORDIAM)*

 'Beloved Daughter of My Heart: My soul will become relieved if this letter gets to *you* in good health. My health is good and is ready to serve *you* in everything **you** want to command. I say, My Dear Daughter Úrsula de Orellana, I give *you* notice and advice that, after 15 years, **your** husband has come to my home to beg for my pardon. He has struggled so much. It must be God's will, because he came in through the door of my house with **your** godfather Mateo Arenas, who married *you*, and with *your* godmother, Catalina Salinas. For **your** own life's sake! I want *you* to be careful, don't cause more pain than *you* already caused me. Since many people are getting enrolled now to go to Chile, **your** husband wants to search for *you*, if God gives him good health. If something happened to *you*, here is the name of the priest who married *you*: Pedro Cisnero, priest of the main church of Cusco. For Maria's sake, I beg *you* to be careful! I know, as weak as *you* are as a woman, *you* have struggled. Watch **yourself**, for **your** own life's sake! I have gotten older after hearing what **your** mother Juana Quispe says about you. *Your* brother became a monk at San Juan de Dios and *your* other brother wants to go to search for *you*. Antonio Emandes, **your** husband, already went to Copacabana: if **your** husband happened to find *you*, serve him well because he is *your* husband, for the Most Holy Virgin's sake! The muleteers from Lima told me that *you* were […] It was not **your** fault, but mine, because I made *you* marry at such a young age. I beg *you* not to curse me in any business of mine, because I would love to be at **your** side as the beloved daughter of mine, in order to serve *you* in any possible matter. Write me in the first messenger station you come across. 27th, December 1655 I wrote this letter, and good bye. May God watch over *you* many years. To my daughter Úrsula de Orellana'

In this letter, we find 13 verb forms in the second person: ten of these seem to agree with *tú*, whereas only three agree with *vos*. Due to the lack of graphic accents in the manuscripts, there are no certain grounds, however, for deciding whether these verbs are conjugated in agreement with *tú* or with *vos* (*des* could also descend from the second person plural form, i.e. from *dedes* – after lost of intervocalic /d/ – or from an hypothetical intermediate form *déis* – thus, via monophthongization). The only exceptions are the forms *as dado* and *escríbeme*, whose morphology undoubtedly points towards the 2SG *tú*. There are 12 object clitics *te* and only one *os* (*guardaos*), which is used to introduce an important part of the letter (the main admonition). There is only one explicit subject pronoun, *vos*, which is placed postverbally and, as regards its role in information structure, carries a contrastive focus: *no tenías vos la culpa, sino es yo* (see also Octavio de Toledo y Huerta 2008, about the adversative connector *sino es*, which became quite common in Spanish during the 17th century).

The data commented on so far lead to the following conclusion: the use of SG *vos* (and the other forms of its paradigm) is much less frequent, and consequently much more marked, than the use of *tú*; when *vos* does appear in the text, it is clearly emphatic. This state of affairs looks consistent with a variety that we assume to be transitioning from *voseo* to *tuteo*. We know that the former had spread out as a T-pronoun all over the Spanish-speaking world during the 16th century, when *tú* started to be restricted to just a few social functions like when addressing children or slaves (compare Anipa 2001; Bentivoglio 2003; Carrera de la Red & Álvarez Muro 2004), whereas the latter must have prevailed in Cusco at a later stage of the colonial era (the Cusco region, unlike some enclaves of Southern Peru, has no remnants of SG *vos* today). However, the possessive *tu* is used only four times in the entire text, against nine instances of *vuestro*/*a(s)*, which is employed more frequently both with an emphatic function (such as when the possessive is postnominal: *por vida vuestra*) and, most importantly, in its neutral use (as in *vuestra madre*).

Elucidating the motivation for the partial alternation between (the forms belonging to the paradigm of) *tú* and (those belonging to the paradigm of) *vos* becomes a challenge for which we do not yet have a clear response.11 Be that as it may, it is clear that, even when the use of *tú* had already become generalized, the possessive *vuestro*/*a* could still show up in some discourses. We could, thus, postulate a longer survival of possessives when the functional sphere of the pronominal paradigm they belong to is "invaded" by other pronouns, as when *tú* gained ground over *vos* and finally pushed it back in Colonial Peruvian Spanish. We wonder, then, whether PL *vuestro*/*a* paralleled SG *vuestro*/*a* in its longer resistance to a process of pronominal substitution: in our case, the pronoun *ustedes*, which is increasingly used from the second half of the 17th century onwards. As a matter of fact, the possessive form has already been proven to also persist longer in the process of displacement of *vosotros* by *ustedes* in Andalusian Spanish (Lara Bermejo 2015: 438). Another example of possessives resisting the invasion of other pronominal forms for some time is the use of 1PL *nuestro*/*a* in the letters written by the king to the colonial governors at a time when the subject pronouns, object clitics and verbal endings had already adopted the grammatical paradigm of *yo* (see Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 189–192 about the remnants of the so-called *majestatic plural*). Lastly, we

**11** As has become clear, emphasis cannot be the only reason. Utterances like *Si acasso te hallare vuestro marido, agasajaldo, qu'es tu espos[o]* 'If your husband happened to find you, serve him well because he is your husband', may give us an additional hint to understand the variation between *tú* and *vos*. The first part of this utterance (a conditional clause followed by its apodosis) conveys a supposition, a possible scenario that can or cannot be realized in the future, whereas the second clause conveys an already proven fact 'he is *actually* your husband'. If we now read the rest of the text from this perspective, we discover that, in other cases, the utterances including the forms of *vos* contain conditionals, actions/states that are oriented to the future or reflect the speaker's wishes (the modal verb *querer* 'to want' is especially present in the text). This kind of modal reading seems to be absent in the actions rendered with *tú*.

cannot exclude the possibility that *vuestro*/*a* expanded from SG to PL, as happened in 19th and 20th century Uruguayan Spanish (Bertolotti 2007), the main objection being the fact that the colonial use of SG *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco (as in example (9) above, a letter written by a father to his daughter) was not marked for formality.

## **3.2** *Hypothesis 2: The use of* **vuestro***/***a** *results from its idiomaticization from legal dispositions and other official directive documents*

Throughout the entire colonial period we find *vos* in directive documents (*do cumentos dispositivos*, in the tradition of Hispanic Diplomatics), that is, in the official documents written from a superior position or institution to an inferior one (Real Díaz 1991) – for instance, when the king writes to governors or *Audiencias* (i.e. in the so-called *cédulas reales* 'royal decrees'), when governors write to mayors or to local commissioners, or when the *cabildos* (town councils) promote someone to an official position (Fontanella de Weinberg 1989: 114; Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 236–237). This leads us to two different types of *vos* that have to be studied separately. Fontanella de Weinberg (1992) refers to the polysemy of *vos*, whereas other authors speak of the "formal" or "reverential" *vos* as opposed to the common *vos*, although without further theoretical discussion. We consider the best way to catch these differences is to distinguish, according to the testimony in example (10) below, a "personal" *vos*, which was used in everyday's linguistic interactions, from an "official" *vos*, which was determined by the institutional role of the speakers and their addressees and found in very specific discourse traditions, such as those that belong to the institutional dialogue in the Hispanic colonial world. This differentiation between the interpersonal and the institutional dimensions of *vos* was perfectly known and explicitly regulated in the most important exponent of Spanish Colonial Law, the so-called *Laws of the Indies*, published in 1681 (Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 237; 2014: 69–72):

(10) Qvando Las Audiencias despacharen mandamientos por Nos el Presidente y Oidores, traten en ellos de **vos** á los Iuezes de Provincia, por hablar de Tribunal superior á Iuez Inferior, porque no se ha de considerar esto segun las **personas**, sino á los **oficios**, que exercen.

 'When the courts passed writs on behalf of Ours, President and Hearers, they must address provincial judges with **vos**, since a superior court is speaking to an inferior judge, because this must not be related to the **person** but to the **person's position**.'

Both types of *vos* also differed formally in three important aspects: (1) the object counterpart of subject *vos* in its institutional use was always *(v)os* (the change to *te* took place only in the case of personal *vos*: Díaz Collazos 2016: 35–61); (2) possessives remained in their etymological form as well (*vuestro*/*a*), without changing to *tu*, as occurred in the case of personal *vos*; and (3) most importantly, official *vos* could be used both with a singular and a plural meaning. To illustrate the latter, we reproduce here an excerpt of a royal disposition (1561) addressed to the religious authorities of the Andean provinces of Cusco, La Plata (today's Sucre) and Quito (example (11)); in addition, to specifically show the use of PL *vuestro*/*a*, we cite the beginning of a royal letter to the authorities of the City of The Kings (current Lima) (1564) (example (12)):

(11) Muy Reverendo y Reverendos in Cristo padres Arzobispo de la ciudad de los Reyes y Obispos de las ciudades del Cuzco y la Plata y Quito de las provincias del Perú. A nos se ha hecho relación […]. Lo cual visto por los de nuestro Consejo de las Indias, fue acordado que debía mandar dar esta mi cédula para **vos** y yo túvelo por bien, por ende yo **vos** ruego y encargo que […] (Konetzke 1958: 390)

 'Very Reverend Archbishop and Bishops of the cities of Cusco, La Plata and Quito, in the provinces of Peru. We have been informed that […]. This having been seen by our Council of the Indies, it was agreed that this letter of mine was given to **you**, which I considered to be good, so I ask and order **you** now to […]'

(12) El Rey. Presidente y Oidores de la nuestra Audiencia Real de la ciudad de los Reyes de las provincias del Perú. Vi **vuestra** letra de 12 de abril del año pasado, y en lo que **decís** que […] (Konetzke 1958: 412)

 'The King. To the President and Hearers of Our Royal Audience in the City of the Kings, in the provinces of Peru. I saw **your** letter of April 12th from last year, and regarding what **you** say about […]'

The formal characteristics of official *vos* were maintained throughout the entire colonial period, as can be easily confirmed by looking at the *cédulas* (legal orders on behalf of the king) written during the 18th century (Muro Orejón 1969), including those written to the *Audiencia Real* of Cusco, which became independent from Lima at the very end of the colonial era (1787) (Mejías Álvarez 1995).

These different types of dispositive documents influenced each other in such a way that the documents written by the king to the civil and religious authorities such as bishops, regional governors and the *Real Audiencias* served as a model for the latter when they had themselves to write legal directives to

other subordinated local authorities, and so on. That is why several burocratic expressions were repeated and transmitted throughout the entire official correspondence in the Hispanic colonies. Finally, this sort of "officialese" was, to some extent, received by ordinary people, as when municipal edicts were read in public in the town squares. In addition, all over the Hispanic colonies, some critical *cédulas* were expected to be read in public:

(13) y para que lo susodicho sea público y notorio y ninguno pueda pretender ignorancia, se pregone públicamente esta nuestra cédula en las ciudades y pueblos que pareciere de la dicha provincia de Tierra Firme, y de la publicación de ella se tome testimonio en manera que haga fe. (Konetzke 1958: 490).

 'and in order for all the aforesaid to be public and well-known and in order for no one to be able to pretend unawareness, I command this royal disposition to be publicly read in all affected cities and towns of the aforementioned province of Tierra Firme and I command this public reading to be registered by official scribe.'

The hypothesis, that some expressions that were first typical in official documents later became widespread in American Spanish, has been mentioned, though not really explained, by Cuervo (1954: 553, 557) and Guitarte (1969) (compare Carrera de la Red & Gutiérrez Maté 2009: 44). In our view, the expansion of elements whose usage was originally restricted to officialese has to be seen as an *idiomaticization* process (Ger. *Idiomatisierung*) in the sense of Koch (1997), that is, a process according to which a given linguistic expression (word, structure, etc.) escapes from one specific discourse tradition (or from a reduced set of discourse traditions) and becomes widespread in the language, thus becoming an integral part of the "historical-idomatic" rules of a given language (Coseriu 1982). To put it more simply, an expression that was formerly used only in texts with very specific characteristics becomes widely idiomatic (even though it may still be stylistically marked). To cite another example, in Gutiérrez Maté (2015: 189) it was postulated that the construction *servirse (de)* + INF (lit. 'to be served to do something'), which is used in many parts of Hispanic America, including the Cusco region, for polite requests in public speeches or in different formal circumstances with the meaning of 'to do the favor of doing something' (or just 'do something, please'),12 was the result of another idiomaticization from colonial documents

**12** One example (also from the Cusco region) will suffice to illustrate this use: *Señores pasajeros, sírvanse abordar su tren por las puertas de embarque señaladas en su boleto* 'Dear Passengers, please get on your train through the boarding gate as specified on your ticket'.

## **3.3** *Hypothesis 3: The use of* **vuestro***/***a** *results from the revitalization of* **vosotros** *(and its entire paradigm) in 19th century American Spanish*

The revitalization of *vosotros* (and its etymological paradigm) in (post-)independence American Spanish has been pointed out before (for a short summary, see Bertolotti, in this volume, 299–301), as has been the idea that *ustedes* was never a real V-pronoun in Colonial Spanish but a pronoun of address with a wider spectrum of uses (See above, 330). As regards the distribution of *vosotros* and *vuestro*/*a*, Frago Gracia (2011: 57) states that these forms can be found in almost any text type at the time of independence, most especially in official texts – generally written in a very traditional style, in doctrinal books or those characterized by erudition, and in those marked by solemnity, which, interestingly, may also strive for an emotional approach to the addressees, trying to encourage and persuade them.13 Our claim is that prior to that time (say, during the last decades of the colonial era) the use of *vosotros* and its entire paradigm had become restricted to very few discourse types but had not disappeared completely, so it could experience a more or less ephemeral "revitalization" during the 19th century. This was partly because of an imitative and reinterpretative process of some linguistic patterns from European Spanish (see further below), partly because of the need for new linguistic strategies in order to shape the new discourses (most especially, at the political level) that were brought about by the birth of the new Hispanic American nations.

Unfortunately, our knowledge of Colonial Spanish at the turn of the 19th century is still limited, but it seems plausible to assume that the use of *vosotros* was, at best, obsolescent in ordinary conversation and had become restricted to just a few types of formal discourses. Amongst these, we find not only official documents but also some other texts that we consider to be paradigmatic such as the catechism *Explicación de la doctrina cristiana acomodada a la capacidad de los negros bozales* (1797), written by Nicolás Duque de Estrada in Cuba. In the preface

**13** "Aunque el pronombre *vosotros*, y correlativamente el posesivo *vuestro*, puede encontrarse en no importa qué texto de la época de la Independencia, lo cierto es que su aparición se da con mayor profusión, incluso con regularidad, en los de carácter oficial, de estilo por lo general muy tradicional, en los doctrinales o marcados por la erudición, y en aquellos envueltos de solemnidad, que también pueden buscar, curiosamente, el acercamiento emocional a los destinatarios cuyos ánimos se desea enfervorizar y conquistar […]". 'Although the pronoun *vosotros*, and in correlation the possessive *vuestro*, can appear in no matter what text of the Independence era, it is certain that its use is more common, even regular, in texts with official character, which in general have a very traditional style, in doctrines or in texts characterized by their erudition, and in such texts involved in ceremonial situations, which curiously can also achieve emotional reconciliation to the addressees, seeking to lift and conquer their spirit' (Frago Gracia 2011: 57).

to the edition of 1823, which is addressed to other priests working in the evangelization of Black slaves in Cuba, the author constantly uses *vosotros* (example (14)), whereas he only uses *ustedes* in the dialogues rendering prototypical interactions with slaves (example (15)).14 Since the main stylistic principle governing these dialogues is, as the author states, to abandon "el uso de discursos elevados, de palabras cultas y rebuscadas" 'the use of elaborated discourses and erudite, stilted words' (*Dedicatoria*, iv), which he even accomplishes by using *foreigner talk*, it becomes clear that *ustedes* was not stylistically high, while *vosotros* was valid for at least some formal contexts. Interestingly, for the most stereotyped discourses like the final reverential words, he employs the abbreviation *Vds*., which, since the letter *m* is lacking (as opposed to the abbreviation *Vmds*.), we tend to read as *ustedes* rather than as *vuestras mercedes* (compare García Godoy 2012: 122, 143) (example (16)). If this is correct, we might be obliged to distinguish between an idiomatic, ordinary use of *ustedes* and a formal or reverential use, which seems to be restricted to just a few formulaic expressions at the turn of the 19th century and, most importantly, already used with the possessive *vuestro*/*a* (see *vuestro siervo* in example (16)).

(14) Venerables sacerdotes, encargados de la instrucción de los negros esclavos, de los respectivos ingenios que se han puesto á **vuestro** cuidado. A **vosotros**, amados de mi alma, se dirige, como á su centro, este cuadernito. (p. 3)

 'Venerable priests, you, who are devoted to the instruction of Black slaves in the different sugar factories **you** are taking care of. To **you**, my beloved in my soul, is addressed this booklet in its core.'

(15) **Ustedes** mismos no dicen "ese Hombre, esa Muger está loco"? Sí, porque solo una gente que tiene enfermo de loco puede facer así; pues **ustedes** también están locos, porque cuidan al cuerpo no más; y no cuida el Alma. Como Hijo son mejor que Perro, Alma mejor que Cuerpo. (p. 132)

 'Don't **you** say, "that man, that woman is crazy"? Yes! Because only the people who have the illness of madness can do so; thus, **you** are crazy yourselves, because you take care of the body and not the soul. Just as sons are better than dogs, so [is the] soul better than [the] body.'

**14** Perl & Große (1995: 205-221) were the first to note this asymmetry, even though they did not consider this dedicatory but only the final words of the catechism, in which Estrada again addresses the public who his work was addressed to.

(16) BLM [beso las manos] de **Vds** [=ustedes?]. **Vuestro** siervo en Señor Jesucristo. (p. 8) 'I kiss **your** hands. **Your** servant in Jesus Christ.'

The use of *ustedes* in similar contexts to those of example (15) is also documented in Andean Spanish around 1800. In a theater play written in 1799 (Arellano & Eichmann 2005: 216) a white doctor addresses two Black protagonists in the following terms:

(17) Qué hacen **ustedes** aquí? […] yo **les** mando a los dos que pronto **hagáis** amistades.

'What are **you** doing here? I order **you** two to make friends soon'

To further complicate things, *ustedes* could occasionally combine with the paradigm of *vosotros* (in this example: *les… hagáis…*). However obsolescent the use of *vosotros* (and the different forms of its grammatical paradigm) may have been, it was still known to some extent, as the examples (14)-(17) have proven, so the well-known impulse of *vosotros* during the early postcolonial era could take the floor more easily. It is relatively common in several journals of the new American nations (e.g. when editors address their readers) and it even passed into the most patriotic texts such as national anthems. The following excerpt comes from the Mexican anthem (written in 1853):

Bertolotti (2007: 24–27) accurately explains how during the 19th century the typically European pronoun *vosotros*15 could have been considered somewhat special and consequently reinterpreted for formality in at least some parts of Hispanic America. As we know, the manifold outlook of Hispanic America towards the old metropole and its linguistic varieties from the very first decades after

**15** The ultimate specialization of *vosotros* as a T-form might have taken place during the 19th century as well, since we find its use as T just in an embryonic state during the 18th century (Fernández Martín 2012: 153-199).

independence gave birth to different, even opposing, attitudes (Guitarte 1991) that, unfortunately, we do not yet really understand in their linguistic praxis. In other words, we do not know to what extent this process may have changed the linguistic profile of Hispanic America, that is, which linguistic features were involved16 and, most importantly, how exactly the *architecture* (Coseriu 1982) of varieties (especially, as regards its situational marking and the opposition *language of immediacy*/*language of distance*) was reorganized at that time in the different Hispanic American nations.

# **4 Understanding the productivity and the geolinguistic distribution of** *vuestro***/***a*

The three hypotheses introduced in the previous section are to a great extent compatible with one other. For instance, the idiomaticization of *vuestro*/*a* from official colonial documents (Hypothesis 2) looks even more plausible, as the SG possessive form had formerly become successful (at least for some time) in resisting the paradigmatization of *tú* (Hypothesis 1) and as the whole paradigm of *vosotros* was revitalized in postcolonial American Spanish (Hypothesis 3). However, even combining all three hypotheses, they fail to fully account for the fact that today's use of *vuestro*/*a*, as we have described it in Section 2, seems to be mostly limited to the Cusco region. It is therefore necessary to have a closer look at the

**16** There are other linguistic features taking root in American Spanish that might have followed the pattern of European Spanish. Amongst these, we should mention the so-called *leísmo de cortesía* 'polite *le*'. The emergence of this use in American Spanish has not been clearly defined yet but it is supposed to be fairly old, even though it may have developed quite recently in some regions (Dumitrescu & Branza 2012). It consists of the use of *le(s)* instead of *lo(s)* as the object clitic counterpart of *usted(es)* (*NGLE* §16.8d). Despite its traditional designation (Lorenzo Ramos 1981), this feature seems to be related, first, to the stylistic dimension: Sedano (2011: 177), who describes this use in Venezuela, considers it to be "refinado". The sociostylistic history of this use in American Spanish resembles the history of the feature analyzed throughout this chapter; however, especially for the Andes, there are issues that would require further research. Just to mention one, the use of polite (or *refined*) *le* is very significant in Quito (Dumitrescu & Branza 2012: 679), but contrasts with the opposite use in other parts of Ecuador. Many Ecuadorians have overgeneralized the clitic *le* for all kinds of objects (also feminine); for these speakers, "in more prestigious registers, the use of *lo* (and *la*) in direct address, corresponding to *usted*, carries more respect than *le*, the inverse of trends found elsewhere in Latin America" (Lipski 1994: 251). In light of the above, special attention has to be paid to the clitic pronouns all over the Andes, since many vernaculars have been deeply restructured by language contact with Quechua, Aymara and other languages.

sociocultural idiosyncrasies of the Cusco Region in order to come closer to a valid explanation. In this section, we will analyze the linguistic feature described here from the perspective of cultural and language contact. More precisely, we claim that a notional transfer based on the Quechuan inclusive/exclusive distinction, which is deeply ingrained in Quechuan grammar (specifically, in the pronominal system, including possessives/relationals) and fully utilized by Quechua speakers to make discourse progress in one or another direction (Howard 2007), could have determined the success of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco Spanish. In Section 4.2, we will elaborate on this explanation by adopting a more general perspective that discusses the emerging of an idiosyncratic *Cusqueño* identity, which is behind the linguistic idiosyncrasy of Cusco Spanish.

### **4.1 Language contact: notional transfer from Quechua**

Interesting obervations on notional transfer have already been made in a significant number of studies on language contact, which show how languages can influence each other without borrowing any explicit forms, but transfering notional content. For example, Babel & Pfänder (2014) prove the effectiveness of this concept with a case study on the use of the past perfect (*había* + past participle) in Andean Spanish, which, aligning with comparable functions of Quechuan grammar, has incorporated a creative use as a mirative/deictic marker to the standard Spanish reading as past perfect tense. According to them, "[t]he effects of language contact are the accumulation of communicative routines or habits, which speakers play on as they engage in creative language use" (Babel & Pfänder 2014: 254).

This approach draws, to a great extent, on two other existing sources that we will also summarize here: (1) Jarvis & Pavlenko's (2008) plea for the importance of "subjective" similarity (similarity from an interlocutor's perspective) to facilitate transfer – also between typologically dissimilar languages ("objective" [dis-] similarity from a linguist's perspective); and (2) Johanson's code-copying framework (e.g. 2008). The first claims that the key to understanding language users' behaviour in language contact is to focus on the "similarities (and differences) that the L2 user *believes or perceives to exist* between the languages" (Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008: 178–179, our emphasis). Thus, speakers look out for forms, structures, meanings, functions or patterns in the target language that they perceive to be similar to a corresponding feature of the source language (perceived similarity). On the other hand, they assume the presence of a counterpart in the L2 of a linguistic feature that they know from the source language (assumed similarity). Jarvis & Pavlenko claim that such interlocutors' beliefs about the congruences

between languages fuel language transfer, also between typologically distant languages like Quechua and Spanish.

The second, Johanson's code-copying model, provides a detailed framework for different possibilities on how parts of languages can be combined or copied selectively. He distinguishes between four types of copies: combinatorial, material, semantic and frequency-based (Johanson 2008). Typical cases of combinatorial copies are loan translations or syntactic calques, in which, generally speaking, a structure or pattern of the target language is partially rearranged to fit into a scheme from the model language: for example, whereas (S)OV word order would be considered exotic to the general Spanish grammar, speakers of Quechuainfluenced Spanish frequently make use of it, though most especially in emphatic contexts (which does not fit perfectly into the Quechuan pattern, where SOV is the unmarked word-order) (Pfänder et al. 2009: 102–108). Material copies include not only loanwords but also phonological or morphological copies, for example, the incorporation of the Quechuan attenuative suffix *-ri* into the imperative paradigm of Bolivian Spanish (Pfänder et al. 2009: 242). Semantic (or functional) copies overlay the semantic content (in its broader sense) of one language with the semantics of the other, as when speakers of Andean Spanish, adapting the function of Quechua subordination suffixes, use the Spanish gerund construction mostly for adverbial subordination (Pfänder et al. 2009: 139–147; Soto Rodríguez & Dankel, in press). Lastly, frequency copies adopt the usage of a feature from the model code in the corresponding feature of the target code: a well-known example is the higher percentage of explicit subject pronouns in the Spanish spoken in the US because of language contact with English (Silva-Corvalán 1994). Furthermore, Johanson (2008: 62) stresses the fact that copies cannot, by definition, be identical to their models. Most typically, the semantic functions of copies have not reached the same stage of grammaticalization as their models and their use is often pragmatically determined (Johanson 2008: 70).

Finally, a complementary approach is the cognitive one adopted by Slobin (2016), who brings up the concept of "thinking for speaking". He considers contact phenomena as the long-term result of framing communicative interactions in different languages. He follows Levelt's (1989) psycholinguistic model, who distinguished a "conceptualizer" planning the forthcoming speech act from a "formulator" encoding the message on a lexical, grammatical and phonological level, and he further elaborates on this model by defining how it works in a language contact scenario. In this case, the conceptualizer becomes attentive to those meaning areas that are regularly marked in the contact languages and accomodates the linguistic outcome by providing formulation strategies in both languages. In other words, speakers who have to switch between languages frequently conceptualize the world in one language whilst speaking in another. This leads to contact-induced changes when speakers accommodate their "thinking for speaking" from the source language to the target language. To illustrate this, Slobin presents two contact scenarios (one of them being Spanish-Quechua language contact) where the language lacking grammatical marking for evidentiality has created new means for doing so out of the forms available in the target language.17

To sum up, whereas Johanson (2008) takes an empirical-observational perspective on a well-established contact variety, Jarvis & Pavlenko (2008) study the L2 accquisition process itself by focusing on speakers' assumptions and perceptions about the L2, and so does Slobin (2016) from a more cognitive viewpoint (more specifically, by focussing first on the dynamics in language processing mechanisms that enable contact-induced change). What is at stake in all of these approaches is the way in which speakers' communicative routines, which work on a cognitive level but have been shaped culturally, affect their understanding of how target languages work and give rise to linguistic outcomes in such a way that they are contextually and socially adequate. All approaches show how speakers creatively operationalize the potential of the available linguistic forms to convey their semantic and pragmatic needs in context-dependent ways. These studies relate to ours in that the strategic use of *vuestro*/*a* seems to be reflecting the same kind of contact-induced change: more specifically, the creative operationalization (reinterpretation) of a Spanish linguistic form to convey a communicative routine that is fully grammaticalized in Quechua.

As stated at the very beginning, scholars, even those working on Andean Spanish, have overlooked the use of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco for several reasons.18 However, some studies have already noticed a special (or strategic) use of other possessives and personal pronouns working as emphatic markers for delimiting/

**17** For his Spanish-Quechua case study, Slobin (2016) limits himself to the already mentioned case of the Spanish pluperfect, which has been reinterpreted as an evidentiality/mirativity marker of unwitnessed information; however, a similar observation can be made for the development of the Andean Spanish reportative marker *dizque*, which is functionally modeled parallel to the Quechua reportative suffix (Dankel 2015).

**18** Merma Molina (2007: 263), who studies language contact phenomena in Cusco Spanish, including possessives, cites an example of *vuestro,* but in her chapter on reported speech not possessives. However, it has to be noted that her account is selective, not exploratory (she mainly focuses on phenomena that already have broad recognition in the research community). Howard's (2007) approach to data collection (individual interview on community internal topics conducted by herself as an outsider) hardly allows for the appearance of 2PL personal or possessive determiners. In the case of Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012), the data collection contains a broader spectrum of text types, however the data is from the Bolivian variety of Andean Spanish, where, to the best of our knowledge, the phenomenon has not yet been documented.

confronting personal relations in the Cusco region, both as regards Spanish and Quechua. For example, Howard (2007), whose work is devoted to the cultural identities of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia by means of a Critical Discourse Analysis of language attitudes, observes the use of *nosotros* 'we' as a strategy for opposing the voices of speakers and hearers amongst her informants from the Cusco region when speaking Spanish (Howard 2007: 76–77). This is even more true for regional Quechua, where the same discursive strategy is implemented by means of the grammatical differentiation of inclusive and exclusive 1PL pronouns and possessives (Howard 2007: 376–377). In fact, Southern Quechua, including the variety spoken in Cusco, happens to have the most elaborate system of personal reference markers within Quechuan dialectology (Adelaar & Muysken 2004: 212). If we now focus on possessives, we find the following distinctions (Table 1):

**Table 1:** The Southern Quechua possessive referential system; adapted from Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012: 83).

Moreover, on a conceptual level, possessives actually convey a series of associations between persons and entities participating in a communicative event that contribute to shaping speakers' actual discourse, as Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012) have already shown on the basis of Quechua and Bolivian Spanish (they even prefer the label of *relationals* over *possessives*). Their analysis illustrates very clearly how Andean speakers use strategies of possessive/relational marking in the same way in both languages by relying on the same notional concepts and underlying cultural routines, even though the exact surface strategies are substantially different:

las relaciones o vínculos indicados por estos morfemas pueden constituir recursos discursivos importantes para, según la situación, expresar la inclusión o la exclusión y el acercamiento o el alejamiento de un hablante respecto a determinados aspectos; lo cual, a su vez, permite a un hablante atribuir matices afectivos y despectivos a las asociaciones. […] Todos estos valores y usos también se aplican a las muestras de español que hemos analizado. Este hecho nos hace pensar que parece tratarse de un concepto común para ambos grupos de hablantes y que lo único que cambia, según el caso, es la forma. Esta última está condicionada por las posibilidades y recursos que ofrece cada lengua. (Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat 2012: 84)

'the relationships or connections conveyed by these morphemes turn out to be critical discursive means to express, according to the situation, the inclusion or exclusion [of the hearers] and the speakers' proximity or distance to different aspects, which, in addition, enables speakers to assign affective or derogatory nuances to the association process. […] All these uses and nuances apply [not only to Quechua but also] to the Spanish samples we have analyzed. This fact makes us realize that there is just one concept for both speakers' groups and that the only thing that really changes is the [linguistic] form, which is strongly conditioned by the possibilities and expressive means of each language.'

Both Howard (2007) and Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012) emphasize the critical role of establishing clear relations and associations between persons and entities in order for speakers belonging to the Southern Andean culture to construct their discourse. These associations are formally conveyed by the Quechuan possessive/relational system with its clusivity distinction in the 1PL, but this kind of morphological distinction is not possible in Spanish. Nevertheless, the clusivity distinction could be transferred into (at least some varieties of) Andean Spanish on a notional level. Speakers unconsciously probed for available strategies in Spanish were able to emulate, to a certain extent, the original distinction. By so doing, they drew upon other fixed discursive routines in the target language (in our case, within the scope of address forms) that are also functional in the same context types (in our case, interactional discourses in which the relation between speech act participants has to be clear). The strategic use of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco Spanish should be seen as one of these routines.

In fact, the communicative domain of inclusion/exclusion of the hearer and that of addressing belong together in the way that languages codify the involvement or the active role of hearers in speakers' actions or beliefs. Moreover, there might be some degree of correlation between both domains, which often seem to appear in inverse proportion: Southern Quechua displays the clusivity distinction but lacks the distinction based on politeness addressing,19 whereas the opposite is true in the case of Spanish, which lacks any differentiation in clusitivity but displays a relatively complex system of pronouns of address (even more so in colonial times). This correlation is not only characteristic of both languages from our contact scenario, but also of many other languages, as a look at the *World Atlas of Language Structures* (WALS) and more specifically at its features

**19** Interestingly, according to the data of *WALS*, Northern Quechua shows the exact opposite realization of both variables: no clusivity in 1PL, but T-V distinctions in the addressing system.

39A ("inclusive/exclusive distinction in independent pronouns", Cysouw 2013) and 45A ("politeness distinctions in pronouns", Helmbrecht 2013) can quickly confirm.20 If such a correlation between the two domains could be typologically confirmed, we could even think that they are somewhat associated in speakers' minds. In a language contact scenario, therefore, speakers could unconsciously consider a linguistic feature from one of these domains to be the natural replacement for a feature from the other domain or even, according to our understanding of notional transfer, adapt the linguistic forms of one of these domains in the L2 to the needs of the other domain in the L1.

These considerations allow us to think of the strategic use of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco Spanish as an indirect compensation strategy for the missing differentiation between an inclusive and an exclusive form in Southern Quechua. Spanish has only one linguistic form for the 1PL POSS, which makes a direct transfer from Quechua impossible. Since speakers did feel the need to fill the functional gap left by the missing clusivity distinction in Spanish, they searched for an alternative way to keep on assessing their role by opposing the hearers and they found it in the linguistic variable 2PL. *Vuestro*/*a*, which had never disappeared completely from American Spanish, was then fully utilized to convey not only the meaning of 'your-PL' but also the meaning of 'not our'. Actually, *vuestro*/*a*'s informational role (in its strategic use) is that of a contrastive focus that makes explicit the opposition between the 2PL and the 1PL. Speakers took advantage of the variation in 2PL possessives between *vuestro*/*a* and *su* by using the former to convey the opposite meaning to the exclusive 1PL, whereas the latter remained in its canonical use as a referential 2PL (and as a 3PL, which could also be defined as the opposite of the inclusive 1PL). *Su* was itself not suitable for such a creative use, since it was already functionally overloaded and, when functioning as a 2PL, more widespread than *vuestro*/*a* (restricted to some discourse traditions).

**20** The comparison of the maps for both features brings to light some interesting correspondences in several language areas: e.g. European languages systematically lack the inclusive/exclusive distinction and display the politeness distinction, whereas Australian languages regularly exhibit the first distinction but, in most cases, not the second. In addition, there are several languages with negative values for both variables and only a few with positive values for both of them (the Khoisan language Khoekhoe being one of these very few languages). The correlation between the two features (which we mention here only speculatively) is by no means perfect but it should not to be overlooked.

**Table 2:** Personal referential system (PL); Spanish variation *su* – *vuestro*/*a* as a compensation strategy for the inclusive/exclusive distinction.

When speaking Spanish, the creative use of a contrastive 2PL meaning 'you' as opposed to 'us' enables speakers to structure their discourse on the basis of the contrast between them and their interlocutor/s (as regards actions, beliefs, opinions, and so on), that is, on the basis of the same discourse structuring principle for which speakers used the exclusive 1PL in Quechua.

We would surely go too far if we claimed that language contact is the main reason for the success of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco, particularly as it does not account for the fact that this feature seems to be limited to just a small part of the contact zone between Spanish and Southern Quechua (although more empirical research about other varieties is still required). However, we do claim that the phenomenon described here would not have taken root in the region without language contact. To us, understanding properly how notional transfer works may solve, partially at least, the problem of the geographical spread of strategic *vuestro*/*a* (see Section 4.2 for a complementary explanation). As Dankel (2015) has already proven for the Spanish/Southern Quechua scenario, languages offer different structural potentialities to express a given notional category, so interlocutors in different regions – even when contact ingredients remain the same – find different ways to operationalize such a category out of the available linguistic forms. Experiences with categories in multilingual scenarios are first individual, used locally and, finally, may succeed in their bottom-up expansive process, but they may also remain restricted to a more or less local area. Therefore, it is *per se* natural for a contact phenomenon to be restricted to just a small area of the entire contact zone.

A final remark about the discursive meaning of *vuestro*/*a* has to be made: this form is often used in Cusco to shape social identity. In this regard, Howard's (2007) analysis had already proven, though mostly in reference to the 1PL, that the strategic use of personal pronouns plays a crucial role in speakers' creation of a local identity.

Entre las estrategias discursivas que le sirven al hablante para posicionarse dentro del campo social, notamos el uso contextual de los pronombres personales de primera y tercera persona (*nosotros* versus *ellos*). El *nosotros* se vuelve sumamente ambivalente en algunos contextos: su uso estratégico sirve tanto para trazar como para borrar las fronteras socioculturales. (Howard 2007: 377)

'Among the discourse strategies used by speakers to position themselves in the social context, we notice the contextual use of first and third person pronouns (*we* vs. *they*). *We* becomes extremely ambivalent in some contexts: its strategic use allows speakers as much to draw as to erase sociocultural borders'

In a similar vein, Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012), while elaborating on their analysis of possessives (summarized here in the citation above), point out the importance of establishing social relations in the discourse of Andean speakers. In what follows, we will relate this to the singularity of *Cusqueño* social identity.

## **4.2 Cusqueño** *(language) identity and the pride in being* **mestizo**

As the former capital of the Inca Empire and present-day touristic capital of Peru, Cusco has been constructing its own particular identity for centuries. Historically, this city has developed an actual mixed Hispano-Indigenous heritage (*mestizo*) identity since earlier colonial times, where the syncretism between Indigenous and European cultures is recognizable throughout different cultural manifestations. This mixture was always perceived and handled proudly by the local elites, amongst whom Spanish/Quechua bilingualism was quite common during the colonial era and far beyond. Spanish settlers and their descendants who turned into landlords around the city of Cusco often used Quechua and even claimed to be related to the Inca nobles (Mannheim 1991: 71–74). In this particular case, the rigidly stratified society during the colonial times resulted from an adaptation to Inca society, alongside the implementation of the archetypical colonial infrastructure. The pride amongst the ruling classes in thinking of themselves as *mestizos*, as opposed to other Spanish Creoles and most especially to the Indigenous people, who became stigmatized as illiterates, *provincianos* or *campesinos* 'peasants' (Brandt 2016; Delforge 2012), has remained to a great extent intact to this day.

In the last decades, tourism has entered this traditional scenario, altering it partially but also intensifying some previously existing tendencies. *Cusqueño* identity is currently fueled by a symbiotic relationship between ethnic tourism and nativist ideology (*incanismo*), where the latter authenticates the former as a product, while tourism itself (as a response to the international attention gained by Cusco in our global era) intensifies such an ideology (van den Berghe & Flores Ochoa 2000: 23; see also Silverman 2002), and thereby strengthens local pride (see below). Nevertheless, it has to be noted that tourism is not solely responsible for the success of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco Spanish, as any amateur might claim if he/she thought, for instance, that the inhabitants of Cusco were trying to adapt their speech to those varieties spoken by the Spaniards that can occasionally be seen (and heard) on the streets of Cusco (mostly on their way to Machu Picchu). Among the languages of occasional migrants, European Spanish, that is, the only variety constantly using *vuestro*/*a*, is far less common than American Spanish (and, of course, less common than English and some other major languages).21 However, tourism has definitely shaped the current linguistic identities of Cusco, since the city had to determine how to present itself to today's global world.

The local pride already mentioned results both in the cultivation of *Cusqueño* Quechua, which is usually considered to be Standard Quechua, and in a general tendency to use language as a means to stress the city's idiosyncrasy (most notoriously, as opposed to Lima). Niño-Murcia (1997: 156), whose research is focused on the linguistic purism in Cusco (especially, but not only, as regards Quechua), insists on the very same idea:

In accordance with the regional attempt to define the characteristic features of its culture and in order to distance and enhance Cuzco's identity with respect to Lima, language is being used to stress its regional uniqueness within the country and also to create a social hierarchy within the city.

Such uniqueness is built to create a social hierarchy, distinguishing the urban elite from the rural groups of Quechua/Spanish bilinguals. Even though the situation is far more complex, we could state that, to a certain degree, the current opposition between (Spanish) monolingual speakers from the city and (Spanish/ Quechua) bilingual speakers from the rural areas parallels the opposition some authors have postulated for the colonial era between (Spanish/ Quechua) bilin-

**21** The latest statistics of the *Dirección General de Comercio Exterior y Turismo* (Dircetur) of the Cusco regional government show that just 2.1% of all tourists are from Spain, whereas the percentage of tourists from Spanish-speaking American countries is 11% and national tourists account for 38% (numbers taken from the *Boletín Estadístico de Turismo* 2014 of the Dircetur: 8, 11).

gual speakers (i.e. the ruling *mestizos*) and the (Quechua) monolingual speakers (i.e. the Indigenous populations in and around Cusco).

In a study about the "recession" of unstressed vowel devoicing in Cusco Spanish, Delforge (2012: 331) introduces a new element in the formation of *Cusqueños*' self-consciousness and linguistic pride: getting rid of the cultural stereotypes of the Andean region (as seen from Lima and other parts of Peru):

It has been suggested that Cusqueñans' tendency to view devoicing as typical of rural migrants has an attitudinal basis, reflecting their desire to escape the provincial perception of the region that has long existed in other parts of Peru and elsewhere.

Consequently, speakers negotiate their cultural and ethnic identity during their linguistic interactions (Howard 2007: 377), which means that their belonging to a given social group must also be conveyed by linguistic strategies. Amongst these, Howard (2007) – citing De la Cadena (2000: 30–33) – points out, again, the use of *nosotros*:

Al observar los casos recurrentes de ambivalencia en torno al pronombre *nosotros* en los textos, me pregunto si se trata de un rasgo diagnóstico del discurso de un cierto tipo de actor social. Dicho de otro modo ¿podría afirmarse que la ambivalencia en el uso de este pronombre construye un campo discursivo socialmente definido? De hecho, el *nosotros* ambivalente suele tener el efecto de posicionar a los entrevistados a alguna distancia de una identidad indígena, por no decir que construye una **identidad amestizada**. (Howard 2007: 377, our emphasis)

'When we look at the recurring cases of ambivalence as regards the pronoun *we* in the texts, I wonder myself if this is a feature that signals a certain kind of social actor. In other words, would it be possible to state that the ambivalence of the usage of this pronoun builds a discursive field that is socially defined? As a matter of fact, ambivalent *we* usually has the effect for the interviewed speakers of positioning themselves at a certain distance from an Indigenous identity, if not creating a **mestizo identity**.'

We can now highlight the strategic use of *vuestro*/*a*, not just as a particular element in this setting that contributes to *Cusqueño* language identity, but as a prominent discourse strategy that is used in these negotiations. In a significant number of cases, the contrastive meaning conveyed by *vuestro*/*a* delimits the psychosocial role of speech act participants. We cannot decide, however, whether the creation of the contrastive use of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco Spanish meets the culturally determined need of opposing the social role of speakers and hearers or if it is primarily devoted to the more general purpose of setting the conversational role of speakers and hearers without clear social implications (such as when a radio commentator speaks to his/her audience).

For now, we will just say that *vuestro*/*a*'s basic function is opposing (for whatever reason) the voices of speakers and hearers to each other and, in so doing, contributing to discourse structuring and progression. However, we cannot overlook the social conditioning of any discourse, which, most especially in Cusco, seems to serve a very specific set of interests and specifically social stratification. This aspect would solve, partially at least, the problem of the small geographical area of *vuestro*/*a*, even though we find many other cultural and linguistic features widespread all over the Spanish/Southern Quechua contact area.

In this regard, we would like to mention another linguistic feature (also related to the study of forms of address), whose use seems to have been widespread in this (transnational) contact area, being especially intense in the Cusco region. Readers familiar with the literature about forms of address in the Southern Andes may recall some studies by Granda (2004, 2005) about the usage of *su merced* in the same area. Interestingly, one of the main contributions of Granda's work is to describe how speakers of the upper social classes used to address each other with *su merced*. Putting aside other interesting uses of *su merced* that readers will surely be more familiar with, this form of address often carried a social identifying function as well. In the city of Cusco, this use seems to have been very common at least until the mid-20th century. Making use of it was an *acto de identidad lingüística* 'act of linguistic identity', with which speakers showed "su integración en dicha red social, constituida exclusivamente por las familias pertenecientes al estamento aristocrático cusqueño" 'their belonging to this social network, which consisted exclusively of families from Cusco's aristocracy' (Granda 2004: 252). Therefore, it seems plausible that these speakers were willing to assert their belonging to the upper classes both *in-group* (by using address forms like *su merced*) and *out-group* (by using address forms like *vuestro*/*a*, even though we do not preclude the possibility of this form being used *in-group* as well).

If we could confirm that the use of *vuestro*/*a* prevails amongst speakers of the upper classes (more precisely, again, amongst speakers willing to assert their belonging to the upper classes), we should then recall that, in Cusco, *upper class* relates to a *mestizo* identity and clarify that using *vuestro*/*a* is not meant to express disdain for the addressee nor to highlight any relation of *power* (in the sense of Brown & Gilman 1960). Quite the contrary, its use can protect the hearer's *face*; what really matters is that speakers, when using *vuestro*/*a*, bring to the fore their social background and position themselves as highly educated speakers and, more precisely, educated *mestizos*. In this regard, the use of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco can also function as an "act of linguistic identity", but a type of act that does not necessarily rule out the hearers and may even serve as an invitation to the speaker's world, as our example (6) has already illustrated.

Elucidating the idiosyncratic sociological complexity of *Cusqueños* and their *mestizo* identity, which implies a particular adaptation and readjustment of an Indigenous culture, turns out to be a better way to understand why language contact (even at a notional level, see Section 4.1) is still a suitable explanation. Otherwise, we could not account for a contact-induced change that, unlike the vast majority of changes resulting from the contact between Spanish and Indigenous languages in *Hispanic* America, started as a *change from above*.

## **5 Conclusion**

In this chapter, we have analyzed the usage of *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco Spanish, which has never been studied in any depth, despite the fact that it is quite common in the region. *Vuestro*/*a* is always plural and takes part in the grammatical paradigm of *ustedes* (there is no *vosotros* or clitic *os* and no verbal endings of the etymological 2PL). We have distinguished two large groups of uses: formulaic and contrastive or strategic – the latter being especially striking, even though the former still deserve an analysis in much more depth.

Originating from our description of both uses of *vuestro*/*a*, we devoted the rest of the chapter to explaining how they arose in Cusco Spanish. First, we presented a heterogeneous group of problems that our research had to face: the existence of a semantic category of clusivity also in the 2PL, the survival of *vuestro*/*a* in other parts of Hispanic America, its use for referential disambiguation, and the fact that 2PL pronouns are generally understudied in Hispanic Linguistics. However, none of these problems preclude us from considering *vuestro*/*a* in Cusco Spanish a special phenomenon in its own right, as it actually is.

Second, we formulated three complementary hypotheses about its possible origins: (1) its parallelism to SG *vuestro*/*a* (as for its resistance to the overgeneralization of other personal pronouns) or even extension from SG to PL; (2) its *idiomaticization* from dispositive documents; and (3) the revitalization of *vosotros* in 19th century American Spanish. As these hypotheses did not account for the fact that *vuestro*/*a* is limited to Cusco Spanish, we claimed that language contact (specifically a notional transfer from Southern Quechua to Spanish) and the idiosyncrasy of *Cusqueño* society in the shaping of its specific identity provide the missing complementary explanation. Speakers with Quechua-L1, who were used to defining and constantly updating the relation between speakers and hearers during their verbal interactions and, for this purpose, relied on the clusivity distinction in 1PL pronouns, needed a way to keep on doing that when speaking Spanish. This language lacks, as is well known, such a clusivity distinction but does have (even more clearly so during the colonial era) an especially complex system of pronouns of address.

As regards the possessives, there were only two options: *su* and *vuestro*/*a* – the latter being more restricted in the diasystem (in a few discourse traditions, according to Hypothesis 2, and/or in foreign European varieties, according to Hypothesis 3). Speakers naturally adapted the variant that was felt to be more special (or salient) for the new special (or creative) use, which still shared some semantic characteristics with the canonical Spanish form. Of course, the creative use triggered by language contact also leads to convergence with Spanish, not only in form but also in meaning: for example, in the most plausible colonial source, that is, the so-called dispositive documents (cf. Hypothesis 2), *vuestro*/*a* was used from superior to inferior positions, which might still be recognizable, after some restructuring, in the use by speakers from the upper classes when they try to assert their belonging to the group of educated *Cusqueños*. Finally, we consider *vuestro*/*a* to be part of the broader discursive strategy of using personal reference markers as a means of sociocultural demarcation by speakers constantly positioning themselves as part of a (seemingly contradictory) social class of *mestizos*.

This kind of self-awareness on the basis of social criteria might prompt us to consider that the use of *vuestro*/*a* depends on sociolinguistic factors (literacy) or even geolinguistic factors (dichotomy "urban/rural"). This is partially true, particularly if we assume that the role of speakers' own perceptions is the basis for the interaction of linguistic varieties (see Koch & Oesterreicher 2011). However, it should then be noted that educated speakers use *vuestro*/*a* only in formal contexts (if we consider the so-called *Varietätenkette* 'variational chain', as defined by Koch & Oesterreicher 1985, the geographic and social markedness can be readjusted as speech styles or even as *communicative immediacy*/*distance*). On the other hand, as regards its strategic use, *vuestro*/*a* serves a very specific discursive function: contrast between speech act participants. That is why, as stated at the beginning, the usage of *vuestro*/*a* is related to variationist and discursive factors.

The centuries-old but constantly updating development of a very idiosyncratic cultural and linguistic identity in Cusco might allow us to predict a longer persistence of the phenomenon analyzed here. In the last few years, it seems to be increasingly perceived as stereotypically *Cusqueño* by other Peruvians: it has already entered the category of place-linked linguistic expectations (e.g. Carmichael 2016), and this is a sort of local flavor that *Cusqueños* may be willing to maintain for much longer – as shown by example (19) from an internet forum (our emphasis):

(19) La gente de cuzco usa el segundo pronombre plural: **VUESTRO (A) (S)** mientras que la gente de Lima usamos **USTEDES**. Me agrada la forma cuzquena. (sciffo, 27-ene-2008, 17:23, Lima; forosperu.net, thread: "Diferencias entre Lima y las provincias")

 'People from Cusco use the second plural pronoun: **VUESTRO 'your'**, while we, the people from Lima, use **USTEDES**. I kinda like the form from Cuzco'

Our findings offer a rich compendium of possibilities. The availability of more historical corpora (especially from the 18th and 19th centuries) would be crucial to consolidate the diachronic paths we have laid out. Similarly, a broader database with more specific sociolinguistic information and more data from bilingual speakers is needed to be able to make a precise statement on the role of language contact. In this contribution, we have outlined sketches of a much more complex picture. Even though we consider that our analysis is on the right track, many questions remain and can only be addressed after a much larger amount of data has been gathered for every factor we have focused on. The expected rewards, however, seem to be promising and could contribute profoundly to our understanding of language variation, language contact and language change.

# **References**

*the Turkish linguistic landscape: Essays in honor of Eser Erguvanlı-Taylan*, 105–120. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

van den Berghe, Pierre L. see Berghe.

## **Appendix: Transcription Conventions**

based on Selting et al. (2009) and ICOR (2013)

# María Marta García Negroni and Silvia Ramírez Gelbes **Prescriptive and descriptive norms in second person singular forms of address in Argentinean Spanish**

*vos*, *usted*, *tú*

**Abstract:** In this chapter, we analyze and compare the use of second person singular terms of address (*vos*/*usted*/*tú*) in Argentinean mass-consumption audiovisual and printed texts from two different periods (1960 and 2015). Using the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive norms (axiological and objective in Blanco 2000), we show that the paradigm of the former has changed over the last fifty years and now overlaps with the latter. However, there is still a gap between both norms: the use of *tú*/*contigo* and the *voseo reforzado* ("double" *voseo*) in present subjunctive. We propose an explanation for both phenomena in terms of social proximity and symbolic identity.

**Keywords:** Argentinean *voseo*, prescriptive norm, descriptive norm, audiovisual corpus, social proximity, symbolic identity, *vos*, *usted*, *tú*, "double" *voseo*

# **1 Introduction**

Considered a vulgar form of address throughout Hispanic America during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the use of second person singular pronoun *vos* (*voseo* in Spanish) was criticized by advocates promoting normalization – standardization throughout Spanish-speaking areas – who favored the use of second person singular pronoun *tú* (*tuteo* in Spanish) over *vos*. This position has been supported by well-known authors, such as Andrés Bello, who claimed:

El *vos* de que se hace tanto uso en Chile en el diálogo familiar, es una vulgaridad que debe evitarse, y el construirlo con el singular de los verbos una corrupción insoportable.

(Bello 1945 [1847]: 339 § 234)

'The pronoun v*os*, widely employed in Chilean colloquial conversation, is a vulgarity that must be avoided, and constructions including it together with the singular form of a verb are an unacceptable corruption.'

**Note:** We would like to thank José Negroni for his careful reading of the English version of this chapter.

Normalization turned out to be successful in Chile and Peru, but it did not have a decisive impact on Argentinean Spanish. In Argentina, the National Council of Education (*Consejo Nacional de Educación*) required over the years that primary and middle school teachers address their students by the pronoun *tú* (Kurlat 1941). However, no native Argentinean speaker would nowadays employ the pronoun *tú* or present indicative/imperative *tú* forms to address a compatriot in any communicative situation characterized by trust, intimacy, informality and familiarity (García Negroni & Ramírez Gelbes 2004, 2010). This has been the situation at least since the 1960s.

In this chapter, we will analyze the use of second person singular terms of address (*vos*/ *usted*/*tú* forms) in Argentinean mass-consumption audiovisual and printed texts from two different periods. Firstly, we will explore the use of second person singular forms in a 1960s corpus (which includes the Argentinean film *La patota* starring Mirtha Legrand in 1960, political TV programs, presidential interviews, newscasts, cooking shows and magazines). Secondly, we will compare these results with those obtained from a contemporary corpus (which includes the latest version of *La patota* starring Dolores Fonzi in 2015, political TV programs, interviews with the current president, newscasts, cooking shows and magazines).

According to Blanco (2000), two types of norms must be distinguished: objective (or descriptive), and axiological (or prescriptive). Objective norms are defined as the culturally established and socially validated realization of the abstract possibilities of a certain linguistic system. Prescriptive norms, on the other hand, correspond to the current model of exemplary language usage in any community and every prescription concerning it. The main hypothesis in this chapter is that the prescriptive normative paradigm has changed over the last fifty years and now corresponds to the descriptive norm. After giving a brief historical account of second person singular forms of address in Argentinean Spanish, we will attempt to confirm our hypothesis by analyzing some corpus-derived examples.

# **2 Brief historical overview: from Latin** *vos*  **to Argentinean** *vos*

As is widely known and from an epistemological point of view, Spanish *tú* has its roots in Latin second person singular pronoun *tu*. In Latin, there is originally no T-V distinction (Brown & Gilman 1960: 254). Spanish *vos* stems from Latin second person plural pronoun *vos*, which started being used in the 4th century to address the emperor, who embodied two roles simultaneously: the emperor of the Western Roman Empire (based in Rome) and the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire (based in Constantinople). Contemporary pronoun *vos* is therefore connected with power from a historical point of view as *pluralis maiestatis* ('royal we'). It is also the case that "plurality is a very old and ubiquitous metaphor of power" (Brown & Gillman 1960: 254). As time went by, the *vos* employed to address the emperor was assimilated by the nobility. Nobles began to employ *vos*  among themselves and were addressed by *vos* by lower classes.

By the 16th century in Spain, *vos* was so widely used that it started losing its capacity to discriminate among different situations. This encouraged the resurgence of a substitute for conveying formality and social distance, *vuestra merced,* which eventually became *usted*. According to different specialists, such as Fontanella de Weinberg (1999), the use of *vos* at that time was restricted to two very different scenarios. On the one hand, *vos* was a specific term for symmetrical communication between peers and asymmetrical interchanges between parents and children, or between uncles/aunts and nephews/nieces. On the other hand, it maintained "su valor de fórmula de respeto de alta formalidad en lo que en la época se conocía como su "uso antiguo", ya que conservaba el valor característico de vos en la Edad Media" 'the status of a respectful and formal term of address, which was considered "old-fashioned usage" at that time since it was close to the use of *vos* in the Middle Ages' (Fontanella de Weinberg 1999: 1412). Given that *vos* was becoming polysemic, the social strain of avoiding ambiguity encouraged the reassertion of *tú* in intimate, familiar contexts and *vuestra merced*  in highly respectful and formal contexts.

This novel pronominal usage travelled from Spain to Mexican and Peruvian viceroyalties. The use of *vos* as a term of address, established in Hispanic America since the 15th century, prevailed in those areas far from the viceroyal courteous norm, where "faltó una clase social celosa de sus privilegios culturales" 'there was no social class protective about its cultural privileges' (Di Tullio 2006: 48). However, *vos* was uprooted from viceroyalty centers Mexico and Lima, "donde la lengua tenía un alto grado de estandarización" 'where language was highly standardized' (Fontanella de Weinberg 1999: 1414).

In fact, the overall use of *vos* in Hispanic America was progressively stigmatized, and during the 19th and early 20th centuries its use was criticized and considered vulgar. In present-day usage, however, in some Spanish-speaking areas both familiar terms of address *tú* and *vos* are employed to address a singular interlocutor, though rarely on an equal basis. In some regions, for example, in Chile, the use of *vos* forms – pronominal ones particularly – is limited and usually stigmatized, whereas the verbal and pronominal *tú* paradigm is considered the standard variety. In other areas such as Argentina, the pronominal *vos* paradigm no longer carries the stigma, and despite the criticisms, the *vos* paradigm is currently accepted as part of Argentine linguistic norms – both prescriptive and

descriptive – and it is generally employed by Argentinean speakers. An illustrative example is the radio advertising slogan of the Argentinean women's magazine *Para Ti* in the late 1980s: "*Para Ti* quiere decir para vos" '*Para Ti* means for you'. The slogan is a play on words: the name of the magazine means 'for you' in Spanish but employs *ti* (oblique case for the *tú* paradigm) instead of *vos*. The use of *ti* in the magazine name was a "translation" of a formula crystallized by the prescriptive norm – not by the descriptive one – into Argentinean variety.

Nevertheless, the composition of the *vos* paradigm in Argentinean Spanish is not homogeneous. Indeed, second person familiar terms of address are realized by *vos* forms as much as by *tú* forms if we look at the whole paradigm. In the next section, we will consider this mixed *vos* paradigm in Argentinean Spanish.

# **3 The mixed** *vos* **paradigm in Argentinean Spanish**

Table 1 sets out the pronominal paradigm for *voseo*.

**Table 1:** Pronominal paradigm in present-day Argentinean Spanish.

Examples (1) to (6) illustrate this paradigm, with pronominal and verbal *vos* forms highlighted.1 The examples were all retrieved from Argentinean sources (CREA, Google sites, mass and social media, literature, ethnographic personal corpus), both oral and written. *Vos* forms appear in nominative (examples (1) and (6)), vocative (example (2)) and oblique (examples (3) and (5)). *Tú* forms appear in accusative (example (4)), dative (example (5)), and genitive (example (6)). Examples (4) to (6) show the coexistence of *vos* forms (pronominal and verbal) with *tú* forms: *sos* and *te* (example (4)), *sabes*, *te* and *vos* (example (5)), and *vos*, *hacé* and *tuya* (example (6)).

(1) Si *vos* te *vas/*Mi amor, si *vos* te *vas/*Nada más/Podemos decirnos, mi amor.

 'If you go away/My love, if you go away/Nothing else/can we say to each other, my love.'

(Piero, *Si vos te vas*, http://www.musica.com/letras.asp?letra=1285562)

**1** All the examples keep their original spelling – e.g. in example (5) written accents in *sabés* (verb 'know') and in *cómo* (interrogative pronoun 'how') are missing.

(2) Eh, *vos*, que *hacés* ahí/pegado contra la pared como una mosca/che, *vos*, que no *te movés*, no *te movés/*con esta música.

  Para *vos* lo peor es la libertad.

 'The worst thing for you is freedom. The worst thing for you is freedom.' (Sumo, *Viejos vinagres*, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4xwKh1fpFw)

(4) No puedo hacerlo, *sos* mi dios/*te* veo, me sonrojo y tiemblo/qué idiota *te* hace el amor.

'Do what you want, I do what I want, and when you feel like it, we do what we both want.' (Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/frasesforfree/posts/249434588506642)

There are some very specific contexts in Argentinean Spanish where *tú* forms can also be employed for the second person singular nominative case and in prepositional phrases acting as modifiers (*ti* and *contigo*). Thus, when speaking to a foreigner (example (7)), in prayers (example (8)) and in poetry and songs (example (9)) *tú* forms may be found.2

**2** Rizzi (2002) includes *tú* as one of the three variants in the current Argentinean Spanish pronominal system (i.e. *tú*, *vos* and *usted*) and mentions the use of *tú* forms in funeral services, religious prayers, children games and some literary texts.

(7) Yo tengo algunas coincidencias *contigo* respecto del diagnóstico que *haces* en algunas cosas.

 'I share certain similarities with you concerning the assessment you make in some things.' (From Salta governor, J.M.Urtubey, to the Spanish journalist Pilar Rahola,

in *Almorzando con Mirtha Legrand*, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= VpOaGOTxLxs, 15 November, 2015)

(8) Dios te salve, María, llena *eres* de gracia./Bendita *tú eres* entre todas las mujeres.

 'Hail Mary, full of grace./Blessed art thou among women.' (Hail Mary, prayer)3

(9) Después de *ti* ya no hay nada/ya no queda más nada, nada de nada./Después de *ti* es el olvido/un recuerdo perdido, nada de nada.

 'After you there is nothing left/there is nothing left, nothing at all./After you, there is oblivion/a lost memory, nothing at all.' (Lerner, A., *Después de ti*, http://www.musica.com/letras.asp?letra=27995)

Similarly, in contexts where the familiar term of address *vos* could be felt too informal, some speakers may employ *tú* forms (example (10)) instead of *usted*, since they consider the latter too formal.

(10) Estoy de acuerdo *contigo*. 'I agree with you.' (ethnographic personal corpus)

This was the case for the speaker of example (10), a university professor who after his lecture on the national elections in 2015 answered *Estoy de acuerdo contigo*  'I agree with you', to an interlocutor (a senior businessman) he had never met before. Once the conference finished, the professor was asked why he chose to use *tú* forms. He replied that he didn't want to be rude, which he felt he would have been if he had used *usted* – in a university context where most people employ a general *vos* – or *vos*, which he considered could be understood too intrusive or even daring.

**3** Even though this is quite formulaic, in 1999 notebooks for clergymen the formulaic treatment "vosotros" (*La paz esté con vosotros* [May peace be with thou]) was changed into *ustedes* (*La paz esté con ustedes* [May peace be with you]), which suggests that only some formulae are changed.

According to Wainerman (1976: 5–6),

Si actualmente en una tienda no somos tratados de vos sino de usted, sentimos que se nos percibe tan terriblemente viejos, y respetables, como para no merecer el tratamiento informal.

'Nowadays, if a shop attendant addresses us by *usted* instead of *vos*, we believe they considered us so terribly old and respectable that we cannot be addressed by an informal term of address.'

However, the use of *vos*, which has expanded over recent years, can still be considered excessively intimate in some contexts.

With regards to the verbal paradigm, present indicative and affirmative imperative forms take the stress on the last syllable (in Spanish, *formas agudas*), so that they belong exclusively to the *vos* paradigm*,* as in examples (11) and (12).4

(11) Cuando *vos empezás* a decir que habría que encontrar la unidad, yo entonces veo cosas muy hermosas pero muertas, flores disecadas y cosas así.

 'When you start saying that unity should be found, I then see beautiful but dead things, dried flowers and things like that.'

(Julio Cortázar, 2004 [1963], *Rayuela*, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, p.86).

(12) *Descubrí* el teatro. *Viví* el teatro. *Vení* al teatro.

'Discover the theatre. Live the theatre. Come to the theatre.' (http://www.venialteatro.org/)

In the case of other tenses, such as *pretérito perfecto simple* (example (13), similar to English simple past) and *futuro simple* (example (14), similar to English construction *will* + bare infinitive), standard verbal *vos* forms cannot be distinguished from verbal *tú* forms, even though they co-occur with *vos* nominative (see Table 2 below). However, there are two observations to make about the simple past (*pretérito perfecto simple*) and the present subjunctive for *vos.* Firstly, the simple past with *vos* has lost its etymological verb-final *-s* in standard Argentinean Spanish. According to different authors (Di Tullio 2006; RAE-ASALE 2009: 193, 208, among others), this loss may be due to the stigma that has been associated with the addition of a final *-s* in the *tú* simple past form.

**4** In Spanish, words can be classified according to stress placement. Those words that take the stress on the last syllable are called *agudas,* those that take the stress on the penultimate syllable are called *graves* and those that take the stress on the syllable before the penultimate are called *esdrújulas*.

(13) *Vos dijiste* que Redrado era un golpeador y ahora volviste con él.

'You said Redrado was a [wife-]beater and now you are back with him.' (Heated argument between Luciana Salazar and Yanina Latorre, https:// www.primiciasya.com/yanina-latorre-luli-salazar-vos-dijiste-que-redradoera-un-golpeador-y-ahora-volviste-el-n1173772)

(14) *Vos sabrás* lo que hacés arriba del escenario, pero abajo, siendo yo el técnico […]

 'You may know what to do on stage, but here, being myself the one in charge' (Tinelli's warning to Soffritti, TKM, https://www.mundotkm.com/ar/hotnews/589801/el-reclamo-celoso-de-marcelo-tinelli-gaston-soffritti)

Secondly, the present subjunctive reveals a distinctive feature: when employed along with the pronoun *vos* (explicitly or implicitly), it can take the stress on the penultimate syllable (*formas graves*) which is typical of *tú* forms, as in examples (15) and (16), or on the last syllable (*formas agudas*) which is typical of *vos* forms, as in examples (17) and (18). This also occurs in the negative imperative form. We call this latter form *voseo reforzado* (García Negroni & Ramírez Gelbes 2003, 2004).

(15) Yo no quiero que vos *pienses/*Que esto es el final.

'I don't want you to think/That this is the end.' (Los enanitos verdes, *Detrás de las ruinas*, http://www.letrasdecanciones.fm/ los-enanitos-verdes/detras-de-las-ruinas#yo-no-quiero-que-vos-pienses)

(16) No te privaste de nada, buchón. Pero ahora la pagás…. No *mientas*.

'You didn't miss a thing, snitch. But now you will pay for it… Don't lie.' (César Aira, "El criminal y el dibujante".  Concert gig, https://www.facebook.com/Igual-me-chupa-unhuevo-lo-que-vos-penses-283802138310302/)

**5** The correct spelling would be *pensés.*

(18) ¡No *mintás* más, Perro!  Ushuaia, http://www.eldiariodelfindelmundo. com/noticias/leer/50672/no-mintas-mas-perro.html)

Table 2 sets out the familiar second person singular verbal paradigm of Argentinean Spanish.

**Table 2:** The familiar second person singular verbal paradigm of Argentinean Spanish.6

As it can be seen from Table 2, there are only four typical *vos* tenses. Whereas the present indicative and imperative are completely accepted as correct and do not compete with any alternative, typical *tú* forms may alternate with *vos* forms in the simple past (*pretérito perfecto simple*) and present subjunctive: as the latter are not registered in the *Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE)*, they are presented in square brackets in the Table.

# **4 Prescriptive and descriptive norms: historical context**

As has already been mentioned, Blanco (2000) sets out two norms: the prescriptive or axiological norm, and the descriptive or objective norm. She defines the latter as the culturally established and socially validated realization of the abstract possibilities of a certain linguistic system. In other words, the descriptive norm is associated with how language is actually used at a given time as part of inherited habits (cf. Coseriu 1962), and it can be studied from a descriptive per-

**6** The forms in square brackets are not registered in the *Diccionario de la lengua española*, and they are stigmatized, but they are the etymological *vos* forms in the simple past and present subjunctive.

spective. Blanco describes the prescriptive norm as including speakers' ideas of correct usage, the current model of standard language usage in a community and language prescriptions.

The prescriptivist perspective has exerted its influence on communication and educational public policies in Argentina. In 1934, for instance, the Instructions for Broadcasting Stations (*Instrucciones para las Estaciones de Radiodifusión*) were developed by Agustín P. Justo's *de facto* government. These instructions explicitly banned some Spanish varieties, such as *lunfardo* (Argentinian slang, which originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the City of Buenos Aires due to immigrants' influence), *cocoliche* (Italian immigrants' creole, spoken in the City of Buenos Aires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), *gauchesco* (spoken mainly in the Argentinean, Uruguayan and South-Brazilian countryside by peasants and *gauchos,* during colonial and postcolonial times) and *rioplatense* (spoken mainly in Buenos Aires, Rosario and Montevideo, and characterized by the use of *vos*). This ban was based on the idea that these varieties were not "in good taste". In 1943, the head of Telegraph and Post (*Correos y Telégrafos*) sent a memo in this regard, demanding the avoidance of 'every word belonging to slang and every idiom distorting the language that are so common in colloquial language, such as *salí*, *andá*, etc'7 (Article 8, quoted by Vitale 1999).

General Edelmiro Farrell's *de facto* government developed these instructions further and in 1946 the *Manual de Instrucciones para las Estaciones de Radiodifusión* 'Instruction Manual for Broadcasting Stations' was published. This manual would be replaced by a less restrictive law during General Juan Domingo Peron's government. However, in 1957, during the Liberating Revolution (*Revolución Libertadora*),8 this manual would be again replaced by its original form. Furthermore, these norms were echoed in public education of the time. For example, the National Council of Education banned the use of *vos* in every school under its government (Kurlat 1941; Vitale 1999). This meant that teachers had to address their students with *tú* and had to teach pronominal and verbal paradigms excluding *vos* forms.

**7** In the original: "toda palabra del argot o bajofondo y de los modismos que desvirtúan el lenguaje y son tan comunes en el decir corriente, como *salí, andá*, etc."

**8** This is the name given to the dictatorship that overthrew Juan Domingo Perón's constitutional government.

# **5 Corpus analysis: changes in prescriptive and descriptive norms from 1960 to 2015**

The 1960s corpus we analyze here includes (a) examples where there is a gap between the prescriptive norm and the descriptive norm of the time;9 (b) examples where the gap is closing between both norms; and (c) examples that do not respect the prescriptive norm.

The 2015 corpus, on the other hand, seems more homogeneous with regards to the identification of norms. Indeed, the recommendation of the Academia Argentina de Letras in 198210 and the standardization of the *vos* paradigm meant that the use of *vos* became part of the prescriptive norm in Argentina.

### **5.1 1960s: Gap between the prescriptive and descriptive norms**

The 1960s corpus illustrates a certain respect for the prescriptive norm promoted by official spheres. The use of *tú* forms, both pronominal and verbal, and the limited direct address of the interlocutor are considered here as an illustration of the gap between the two norms.

Even though the use of *tú* (pronominal and verbal forms) is limited, it is employed, albeit non-systematically, and with a supplementary meaning: it contributes to the construction of specific scenarios. The use of *tú* in example (19) indicates an assumed, socially detached respect (it is the nursemaid who addresses the child with *tú*, demonstrating at the same time the close affective bond she has with the child who she has brought up).

	- —Paulina, *tienes* que tomar el té. No *puedes* estar sin comer nada.
	- '—Paulina, you have to drink the tea. You must have something to eat.'
	- (*La patota*, film directed by D. Tinayre, 1960)

**9** 1960s TV programs on the Internet (e.g. *El amor tiene cara de mujer*, available at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=RhgnlUUwLMs) can be visited for verification. Even though the objective norm also included the use of *tú*, it was restricted to written language, e.g. letters from parents to children, poems or songs. In oral language, this usage was even more limited, and it was restricted almost exclusively to elementary school teachers, due to ministerial guidelines (see Rizzi 2002).

**10** As Carricaburo (2016) states, in 1982, the Argentinean Academy of Letters was the first academy in Hispanic America to accept the use of *vos* as an educated norm.

In examples (20) and (21), the use of *tú* contributes to the construction of a highly intersubjective and emotive situation, as in melodramas from previous decades.11

(20) Alberto to Paulina

—Hay algo que no te deja resolver, Paulina, no sé qué. Una explicación, un extravío, algo que está en tu subconsciente. ¿Cómo *puedes* aceptar eso? ¡Ni siquiera pensarlo! Traer al mundo un hijo de no *sabes* quién… Nunca me separaré de *ti*.

'—There is something that doesn't let you solve this, Paulina, and I don't know what it is. An explanation, a deviation, something in your subconscious. How can you accept that? No way! Having a child when you don't know who the father is… I will never separate from you.' (*La patota*, film directed by D. Tinayre, 1960)

(21) Paulina to her father

—Te quedaste solo muy joven y no buscaste otra mujer. Mamá murió al nacer yo. ¿*Piensas* que yo te la quité? ¿Que soy culpable de su muerte?

'—You have been alone since you were very young and you didn't look for another woman. Mom died when I was born. Do you think I took her away from you? Do you think I'm responsible for her death?' (*La patota*, film directed by D. Tinayre, 1960)

In example (22), the *tú* forms maintain the original structure of the proverb alluded to (*Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres*)12 despite the construction of a familiar scenario between the participants (the reader and acquaintances alluded to) in the quoted discourse.

(22) *Dime* qué hilo *usas*… ¡Y te diré como *coses*!

 'Tell me what kind of thread you use… And I will tell you how you sew!' (*Mucho gusto* magazine N° 176, June 1961)

**11** One example is the film *La pródiga*, starring Eva Duarte in 1945 (available at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=0eo26wYArYM, last accessed 31 January, 2017).

**12** Literally, "Tell me who you hang out with, and I'll tell you who you are", that corresponds to the standard English proverb "Birds of a feather fly together".

The same respect for the prescriptive norm can be observed in the limited direct address of the interlocutor found in some of the examples, at least when compared to similar present-day situations. Pairs of hosts on TV shows, who addressed their audience with *usted* or *ustedes*, tended not to use the second singular form to each other in the 60s (cf. *Telenoche*, newscast of Canal 13).13 We argue that this strategy is an attempt to follow the still prevailing prescriptive norms in the *Instructions for Broadcasting Stations*. Nowadays, *vos* forms are employed extensively in interactions among broadcast journalists.

## **5.2 1960s: Prescriptive norm closer to descriptive norm**

The 1960s corpus includes some examples where the two norms become closer, relating to the use of *usted* and illustrated in examples (23) to (28). They show the extended use of *usted,* which corresponded to both the prescriptive and descriptive norms. The use of *usted* was extended to many different kinds of interchanges and situations. In the selected examples the use of *usted* reveals an acknowledgement of the social distance between interlocutors, either because of a lack of familiarity or to indicate social hierarchy.

(23) Headmaster to Paulina

—¿De modo que *usted es* la Srta. Vidal?

—Sí, señorita.

—¿*Usted es* católica?

—Sí, señorita.

—Me alegro.

'—So, you are Miss Vidal?

—Yes, Miss.

—Are you a Catholic?

—Yes, Miss.

—I'm glad to hear that.'

(*La patota*, film directed by D. Tinayre, 1960)

**13** An example of what is said here can be observed in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= oYg2s8lLORc (1966). Even though one of the hosts uses *vos* and *¿no te parece?* or the first name of the addressee, it is clear they tend to avoid the second person singular (verbal and pronominal) throughout the newscast.

(24) Student to Paulina

—*Usted es* la que pone las reglas.

—'You are the ruler here.' (*La patota*, film directed by D. Tinayre, 1960)

(25) Para que a *usted le* digan siempre "¡Qué bien coses!", *realice* todas sus costuras con hilos PBT.

 'So that everybody tells you "How well you sew!", make all your seams using PBT thread.' (*Mucho gusto* magazine N° 176, June 1961)

(26) Argentinean cook Doña Petrona to assistant and host: —Ana María, por favor, ¿les *pasa* los ingredientes? —Juanita, por favor, ¿me *levanta* la manga?

'—Ana María, would you give them the ingredients, please? —Juanita, would you roll my sleeve up, please?' (*Buenas tardes, mucho gusto*, TV show for housewives, 1962)

(27) Argentine TV host Andrés Percivalle to the bar's owner: —¿*Usted está* contento de que este bar sea un centro de reuniones para estudiantes?

'—Are you happy with this bar being a meeting point for students?' (*Telenoche*, newscast of Canal 13, 1966)

(28) A journalist to the president: —¿Qué significa para *usted*, Sr. Presidente?

> '—What does it mean to you, Mr. President?' (Interview with president Lanusse, along with his family in 1971)

We want to stress that, as in example (22), the use of *tú* in example (25) creates a familiar, intimate scenario (Maingueneau 1999), in opposition to the main advertising text that only employs *usted* to address the audience (readers). This form is much less used in present-day discourse, as we will show below.

### **5.3 1960s: Deviations from the prescriptive norm**

Finally, we include some examples that do not fit the prescriptive norm of the time: the use of *vos* in examples (29) and (30) and *voseo reforzado* or *subjuntivo agudo* (subjunctive verbs with the stress on the last syllable) in examples (31) and (32).

(29) Paulina to his father:

—Lo que *vos hacés* es como el suicidio.

 —¿Por qué no te *olvidás* de que fuiste juez? Me *tratás* muy duramente a veces.

 —Why don't you forget your days as a judge? You sometimes treat me so harshly.'

(*La patota*, film directed by D. Tinayre, 1960)

(30) Argentine TV host Andrés Percivalle to a student, during an interview at don Celestino's bar:

—Y *vos*, ¿qué *estudiás*?

—*Mirá*, yo estudio Derecho.

 '— And, what do you study? —Well, I study Law.' (*Telenoche*, newscast of Canal 13, 1966)

### (31) Alberto to Paulina:

—He sido humillada, pero nunca… (llora)

 —Por favor, Paulina, no *llorés*! Perdoname, te hago hablar de eso y te hago sufrir. Si te hubiese acompañado esa noche… Tenés que perdonarme.

'—I have been humiliated, but I never… (she cries)

 —Paulina, please don't cry! Forgive me, I'm making you talk about it and I'm making you suffer. If I had joined you that night… You have to forgive me.' (*La patota*, film directed by D. Tinayre, 1960)

	- —Contá ¿qué hace? Dale, Y ¿te gusta?
	- —Dame, no sabe, yo te cuento.

—No te *avivés*. Vos ya miraste.

'—Tell me, what is she doing? Come on, do you like it?

—Give it to me, I'll tell you about it.

—Don't be a know-it-all. You have already watched it.'

(*La patota*, film directed by D. Tinayre, 1960)

As can be seen, the 1960s corpus illustrates usage that did not suit the prescriptive norm from the time, such as the use of pronominal and verbal *vos* forms, typical of informal or intimate contexts.14 Examples (29) and (30) exhibit typical *vos* forms of address (i.e. present indicative and imperative). Examples (31) and (32), on the other hand, reveal subjunctive forms with stress on the last syllable (typical *vos* forms or *formas agudas*). Even nowadays, many Argentinean speakers consider the latter forms incorrect but they occur in some contexts in alternation with typical *tú* forms or *formas graves* (stressed on the penultimate syllable) as will be shown below.

We have already suggested in previous studies (García Negroni & Ramírez Gelbes 2003, 2004) that subjunctive *formas agudas* must be regarded as a case of *voseo reforzado*. In fact, if typical subjunctive *tú* forms with the stress on the penultimate syllable (*formas graves*) are considered part of the *vos* paradigm – as they can be employed along with pronominal *vos* forms (*cf. vos amás*, *amá (vos)*, *vos amaste*, *vos amarías*, *vos ames*), typical subjunctive *vos* forms with the stress on the last syllable (*formas agudas*) should be interpreted as double *voseantes* ("doubly" belonging to the *vos* paradigm)*.* In fact, these forms are not only employed along with pronoun *vos*, but also take the stress on the last syllable, which is typical of present indicative and imperative *vos* forms. Just as lastsyllable stress in enclitic constructions15 (*cf. dámelo* vs. *dameló* 'give it to me' vs. 'give it to *ME*'), this "double" condition of the present subjunctive represents a stronger and closer bond between speaker and hearer by diminishing the social distance between them.

## **5.4 2015: Towards a convergence of prescriptive and descriptive norms**

The 2015 corpus demonstrates that the use of *vos* has increased significantly, without underestimating those scenarios where other forms of address are

**14** We should bear in mind that the Academia Argentina de Letras did not recommend the use of *vos* in every sphere of Argentinean high culture language until 1982.

**15** The Spanish imperative requires postponing object pronouns. This position is called *enclitic*.

employed. This increase has led in particular to a decline in the use of *usted* and to an even greater reduction in the use of *tú* (close to become extinct), although the latter can still be found in the very specific situations we have already mentioned.

The following examples are organized from the smallest gap between prescriptive and descriptive norms to the greatest. The convergence of norms is manifested by the use of *vos* forms and *usted* forms in informal and formal contexts respectively (bearing in mind that informality is expanding in present-day exchanges). Examples (33) to (38) illustrate the use of *vos.*

(33) The person in charge of the educational program to Paulina: —*Vení* así la saludamos.

'—Come here, to welcome her.' (*La Patota*, directed by S. Mitre, 2015)

(34) A student to the person in charge of the educational program: —*Vos sos* el Rubi?

'—Are you the Rubi?' (*La Patota*, directed by S. Mitre, 2015)

 '—I introduce it to you. Maybe you know it as *jengibrillo* [ginger + quince].' (*Tres minutos con Narda*, cooking TV show, Fox, 2016)

(37) Argentinean TV journalist María Laura Santillán to another journalist (Santo Biasatti): —¿Y? ¿Qué tal? ¿*Estás* contento?

'—So? How are you? Are you happy?' (*Telenoche*, newscast from Canal 13, 2016)

(38) Argentinean TV host Santiago del Moro to the audience: —¡Hay tanta actualidad, tanto para discutir! Un programa apasionante, cargado de información, cargado de voces, cargado de informes, por supuesto. Y *vos* que *sos* el/la protagonista de cada noche, muy buenas noches.

 '—There is so much news, so much to discuss!  And you are the one starring every night, good night.'

(*Intratables*, political TV show, Canal América, April 2016)

Even though these examples do not show how frequently *vos* is used, the form clearly occurs in most contexts in the 2015 corpus, in every situation examined and with all kinds of interlocutors, irrespective of their age or social background. This is illustrated in the shift in similar situations from *usted* to *vos* from the 1960s to 2015, as shown in examples (23) compared with example (33) or example (24) compared with example (34), and in the shift from limited direct address of the interlocutor to *vos* in TV newscasts as in example (37).

However, as examples (39) to (42) show below, the use of *usted* has not disappeared. Let's take, for instance, the film *La Patota*. Although some uses of *usted* in institutional, formal contexts were found in the latest version of the film (2015), this term of address is exclusively restricted to four scenes, one of which is presented in example (39), between a policeman and Paulina.16 The rest of the scenes (i.e. between Paulina and her father, her boyfriend, her rapist, the doctor, the psychologist, the person in charge of the educational program, etc.) always include the reciprocal use of *vos*.

(39) Commissioner to Paulina, in the lineup:

 —Señorita Vidal, están las personas para el reconocimiento. *Usted conoce* el procedimiento. Cuando *esté* en condiciones, por favor.

 '—Miss Vidal, the people for the lineup are here. You know the procedure. When you are ready, please.' (*La Patota*, directed by S. Mitre, 2015)

Restricted as they are in everyday use, *usted* forms still remain in some formal contexts: certain advertisements addressed to older addressees (example (40)), media talks with foreign or older people (example (41)), and interviews with certain representatives of the government. Example (42) is revealing because the exchange displays the tension between the previous relationship both interlocutors have (marked by *vos* forms) and the current political position of the interviewee (which calls for the use of *usted*).

**16** The other three scenes with *usted* forms are between the commissioner and Paulina's father (the judge), between one of the students and his teacher, and between Paulina and a Government officer cross-examining her.

(40) BATIMAT. Expovivienda. *Agéndela*! 1 al 4 de junio 2016 La Rural. *Preacredítese* sin cargo en www.batev.com.ar

 'BATIMAT. Expovivienda (home exposition). Put it in your diary! 1st to 4th of June 2016. La Rural. Register yourself for free at www.batev.com.ar' (*Clarín* journal, 13 May, 2016)

(41) A journalist to an interviewee: —Pilar, *déjeme* decir*le*, que afortunadamente en la Argentina desde antes de este gobierno han existido medios opositores al oficialismo.

 '—Pilar, let me tell you that, fortunately, in Argentina before this government media opposed to the ruling party have existed.' (*Intratables*, political TV show, Canal América, November 2015)

(42) A journalist to the president:

 —Bueno, es la primera vez que *lo* entrevisto como presidente. Y además, en realidad, no *lo* puedo tutear, porque estoy entrevistando al presidente de la República Argentina. Me es hasta raro, porque yo a *usted* lo conozco de la época de Boca.

 '—Well, this is the first time I have interviewed you as president. I actually can't address you by *vos,* because I'm interviewing the Argentinean president. It's strange, because I know you from the Boca days.'17 (*Animales sueltos*, political TV show, 21 July, 2016)

Even though they are not very frequent, the 2015 corpus has examples of alternation between *usted* and *vos* in the very same scene and produced by the same speaker, whenever he or she feels there is a change in the situation. In example (43) the shift marks a change in the audience (the speaker addresses the teacher but now in front of students), and in example (44) the change is provoked by the intimacy of the topic (the speaker reveals the name of her rapist to Paulina).

(43) The person in charge of the educational program to Paulina, in front of students:

—Profesora, *se* los dejo.

'—Miss, I leave you with them.' (*La Patota*, directed by S. Mitre, 2015)

**17** The President of Argentina was previously the president of Boca Juniors Football Club, and the comment refers to that period.

In previous scenes, when the students were not present, *vos* forms were employed – see example (13).

(44) Ciro's former girlfriend to Paulina:

 —Me dice la Laura que *usted está* embarazada… *Mire, señora*, yo no *la* conozco bien pero me imagino lo que *usted está pasando*. Si *quiere* que hable con la policía o que *le* salga de testigo o algo…

 El que *te* violó *a vos* es el Ciro. Es el más grande de todos. No va a la escuela. Trabaja en el aserradero. Yo salí con él un par de veces.

 '—Laura told me you're pregnant… Look, lady, I don't know you well, but I can imagine what you're going through. If you want me to talk to the police or to act as witness or anything…

  He is the eldest. He doesn't go to school. He works in the sawmill. I went out with him a couple of times.'

(*La Patota*, directed by S. Mitre, 2015)

As a comparison, within the 48 scenes of 1960s version of *La patota*, *vos* forms were employed in 55% of dialogues and *usted* forms, in 48%. These figures show that, in practice, *vos* and *usted* were almost equally employed. This compares with the latest version of the film (71 scenes), where the use of *vos* rises to 82% and the use of *usted* drops to 15% – six times less than *vos*. Moreover, the same characters' linguistic choices in similar scenes (e.g. Paulina and the headmaster/ the person in charge, the doctor and Paulina) shift from *usted* to *vos* from one version to the other.

Although these figures relate to only two examples of one audiovisual genre, they can be analyzed along with the other audiovisual examples. In the 1960s, *usted* forms prevailed in TV cooking shows, TV political programs, print advertisements and in presidential interviews, either because of being generally chosen or because of limited direct address. This contrasts to 2015, where *vos* forms are the most frequent in all these contexts, even for addressing a president or the TV audience.

## **5.5 2015: Prescriptive norm farther from descriptive norm**

The 2015 corpus also includes a few uses of *tú* and *voseo reforzado* (subjunctive forms with the stress on the last syllable) which exhibit a gap between the prescriptive and descriptive norms, as illustrated by examples (45) and (46) respectively.

(45) A TV host to the interviewee (a foreigner): —Para recordarte, para acordarme de *ti.*

> '—To remember you, to remember you.' (*Intratables*, political TV show, Canal América, November 2015)

(46) Boyfriend to Paulina:

—Yo quiero que *hagás* lo que tengas ganas, pero que estés cerca de mí.

 Example (45), where an Argentinian addresses a foreigner, is a good example of the persistence of the old prescriptive norm. This phenomenon has already been studied from different perspectives and by several authors (see, among others, Bein 1999; García Negroni & Ramírez Gelbes 2010; López García 2006; Ramírez Gelbes 2011). Argentinian speakers' perceptions of their own linguistic variety are typical of a substandard dialect, even though they do not consciously devalue it. This is why Argentinean speakers may switch from *vos* to *tú* forms when addressing a foreigner as if they believed they would not be properly understood.

On the other hand, example (46) is a subjunctive "double" *vos* form. Although it is not included in any grammar book or academic dictionary, this form conveys a closer intimacy – sometimes emphatic, sometimes aggressive – with the addressee. Indeed, while the use of *vos* indicates that interlocutors share a symbolic identity, the use of this subjunctive form (typical *vos* form or *forma aguda*) clearly reinforces the social proximity and reduces the symbolic gap between them, even physically – interlocutors get closer, either in a warm hug or in a physically hostile way.

# **6 Conclusion**

In this chapter, we have demonstrated that the prescriptive normative paradigm of second person singular terms of address has been changing over the last fifty years in Argentina. Even though the chosen corpora (1960s and 2015) were collected from mass media, we consider them representative of the relationship between speaking norms in each period.

The paradigm that underlies the use of *vos*/*usted*/*tú* and limited direct address of the interlocutor in the first corpus differs considerably from that in the second corpus, which exclusively favors the use of *vos* in most contexts. In other words, a gap between the objective or descriptive norm – *vos* in familiar, intimate contexts and *usted* in respectful contexts marked by greater social distance – and the prescriptive norm – use of *usted*/*tú* and limited direct address of the interlocutor – was noted in the first corpus, whereas in the second corpus, the two norms were clearly becoming more closely identified. This identification between norms shows that the use of *vos* constitutes the main variant in most contexts, which has also been accepted, belatedly, by the Academia Argentina de Letras.

That said, there are two present-day examples that reveal a gap between the two norms. The first is the use of *tú* to address a foreigner or a compatriot, in order to convey greater social distance than the use of *vos* would convey but less than the use of *usted*. The second is the use of the present subjunctive with the stress on the last syllable (*forma aguda*), that responds to an attempt to reinforce social proximity and symbolic identity.

One last word concerning both corpora. There has also been a change in the frequency of use of the different terms of address that belong to the descriptive norm (*vos/usted*). Whereas in the 1960s corpus *vos* forms were employed similarly in proportional terms to *usted* forms, in the 2015 corpus the relative use of *vos* has increased significantly. The Argentinian president's response to the journalist quoted in example (42) is an eloquent illustration of this shift:

(47) Yo te desafío, a ver si lográs aguantar "no tratarme de vos" hasta el final, porque, después de tantos años de conocernos, para mí, se te va a escapar. […] Bueno, pero convengamos que es una decisión tuya. Para mí es lo mismo: el respeto no pasa por si se tutea o no se tutea.

 'I challenge you to keep on "not addressing me by *vos*" until the end; because, after so many years of knowing each other, I'm sure you won't be able to do it. […] Well, let's agree that it's your decision. For me, it's the same: respect is not about addressing someone with *vos* or *usted*.' (*Animales sueltos*, political TV show, Canal América, November 2015)

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# María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop **Addressing in two presidential election debates in Mexico (1994 and 2012)**

### Forms and functions

**Abstract:** The distribution of a corpus of Spanish forms of address (n = 3,548) in two Mexican presidential election debates (broadcast in 1994 and 2012) is organized according to two dimensions: *grammatical form* and *appellative function*. It is shown that while in the 2012 debate the candidates use an informal address system, which is almost non-existent in the 1994 debate, these forms are geared towards the citizens who are the candidates' target audience. In the 2012 debate the candidates are addressed with neutral nominal forms or formal grammatical forms. In 2012 horizontal configuration among the interlocutors is restricted to the candidates-citizens relationship. In 1994 there is a predominance of vertical configuration among the candidates and neutrality with citizens as a collective body.

**Keywords:** grammatical forms of address, nominal forms of address, appellative function of language, Spanish forms of address, presidential-election debates in Mexico

# **1 Introduction**

At present, in the face of the demands of citizens in republican countries to encourage dialogic practices between those who govern and those governed, debates among candidates running for political positions in open elections have taken on a basic role in democratic processes. Moreover, these debates are broadcast over all multimedia spaces available to the community, mainly television, radio and the Internet.

Since their inception during the 1960s, presidential debates not only include the opposing candidates, but also one or more moderators, members of the press and, on occasions, voting citizens, which in turn means a complex network of interlocutors on different levels: those who are entitled to take the floor, the arbitrators, and the spectators who cannot speak but who in reality are the candidates' target

**Note:** I thank Georganne Weller Ford for the translation into English from the Spanish original. All errors are my sole responsibility.

audience. In addition to other concerns, the social deixis system of the language being spoken, including forms of address, plays a central role in the configuration of this network of participants during televised presidential election debates.

The objective of this study is to identify the deictic referents of the grammatical and nominal forms of address employed in two Mexican presidential election debates (1994 and 2012) and to contrast their use. The analysis is based on grammatical and pragmatic categories, specifically according to grammatical person, the nominal forms utilized, and the *appellative function* (Bühler 1982 [1934]).

The chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the historical-political motivations that led to the inclusion of debates among candidates aspiring to positions of popular election in diverse electoral processes in Mexico. It also describes the circumstances under which the 1994 and 2012 debates selected for this study were carried out, as well as their discursive structure. Section 3 provides a brief overview of other studies on the referents of forms of address in political debates and defines the formal and functional categories involved, which form the basis of the quantitative aspects of this study. Sections 4 to 7 are devoted to the empirical study. Section 4 describes the corpus of the items included as forms of address in both debates, sets out the central issues to be covered in the study regarding who the referents were, and proposes how to cross some formal and functional variables of forms of address for the referents of these items. Sections 5 and 6 present the quantitative results according to formal and functional criteria respectively. Section 7 includes a contrastive analysis of both debates and a synthesis of the study's findings, followed by the conclusion.

# **2 The 1994 and 2012 presidential election debates**

The Mexican political system is a republican model with three federal powers: the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. The Executive branch is composed of only one person, the president, who is elected directly by the citizens. The presidential term lasts for six years with no reelection allowed, as stipulated in Article 83 of the Mexican Constitution (*Constitución política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos*). Non-reelection has always been respected since the promulgation of this 1917 Constitution, which is still the law of the country.

Nevertheless, during most of the 20th century, the presidents of the Republic were members of the same political party, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). Throughout history, this party gained power in most sectors of society, which in turn made it the party of the State. In fact, the Executive branch, with presidents in office for six years, extended its control to the Legislative and Judicial powers as well (Cosío Villegas 1973, 1974, 1975a and 1975b). Political plurality barely began to gain ground in the decade of the sixties, when a shaky and slow process some called the 'transition to democracy' arose (Becerra, Salazar & Woldenberg 2005; Woldenberg 2012). Little by little, opposition political parties began to occupy seats in Congress and a few governorships in the states. Finally, by the year 2000, a candidate from an opposition party won the presidency (Ortega Ortiz 2010).

As part of its control in diverse arenas of social life, the State party enjoyed an exclusive presence in most of the mass media's broadcasts, especially television (Sánchez Ruiz 2005). Up until the 1980s, almost any candidate from an opposition party had appeared on screen and, if seen at all, it was only for a few seconds. However, by the 1990s, particularly in 1994, a year of presidential elections, the Mexican political system had fallen into a severe crisis, as attested, among other events, by the uprising of the *Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional* ('Zapatista Army of National Liberation') – a movement against the Mexican Army by indigenous peoples from the state of Chiapas in the southeastern part of the country – and the assassination of the presidential candidate from the dominant party of the State.

In the face of a firm conviction by most citizens that there was electoral fraud in 1988, and the ensuing political and social events during these years, in 1994 the presidential candidates from opposing parties signed the 'Pact for Peace, Democracy and Justice', which included the following paragraph in addition to demands for establishing an impartial electoral institution to represent citizens:

Nuestros acuerdos […] son: […] 3. Garantías de equidad en los medios de comunicación masiva, aprovechando los tiempos del estado y promoviendo que los medios concesionados contribuyan eficazmente al fortalecimiento del proceso democrático. Se propiciarán nuevos espacios e iniciativas que favorezcan la participación, objetividad y respeto de todas las fuerzas políticas. Esto garantizará la comunicación de los candidatos con los ciudadanos y la presentación de sus programas y puntos de vista sobre los asuntos más relevantes para la vida del país. (Pérez Fernández del Castillo et al. 2009, vol. 3: 188).

'Our agreements […] are: […] 3. Guarantees of equity in mass media communication, making use of the State´s time on the air and fostering licensed media to contribute efficiently to strengthening the democratic process. New spaces and initiatives will be created to favor participation, objectivity and respect for all political forces, which in turn will guarantee communication between the candidates and the citizens and the launching of their platforms and points of view on the most relevant concerns prevailing in the country.'

Given the presence of social and political pressure in 1994, it was possible to include in the General Board of the *Instituto Federal Electoral* (IFE) ordinary citizens who did not belong to any political party. Even though this body continued to be presided over by the Ministry of Internal Affairs – meaning the Executive power –, opposing political forces also managed to enter into an agreement with

the Institute to organize the presidential debates and broadcast them on national television and radio. Finally, for the first time in Mexico, two debates of this nature were held on May 11 and 12, 1994. The first one was among the three candidates from minor parties and the second, among the three candidates from the major parties. Since then, and up until 2012, there were a total of eight televised presidential election debates, two per six-year period, which were mostly organized by electoral authorities (1994, 2000, 2006 and 2012). In 2012, for the first time, there was also a debate organized by a citizens´ youth movement known as *#YoSoy132* ('I am 132'), which was transmitted over the Internet and provided an opportunity for the candidates to enter into a dialogue with university students.

## **2.1 The presidential election debate in Mexico on May 12, 1994**

In the spirit of the 'Pact for Peace, Democracy and Justice', on January 27, 1994 leaders from various political groups held meetings with state authorities to reach an agreement on reforms in electoral laws. Within this framework two debates were organized among the presidential candidates. Due to the political and historical importance of these debates, I selected the second debate, which took place on May 12, 1994, and have contrasted it with one of the presidential election debates during the 2012 electoral process referred to in Section 2.2.

The presidential election debate in Mexico on May 12, 1994 was broadcast on the national network by the National Chamber of the Radio and Television Industry and was held at the Museum of Technology in Chapultepec, the most important public park in Mexico City. As already mentioned, at that time space available in the mass media was practically non-existent for opposition parties and their leaders. Thus the 1994 electoral debates were an excellent opportunity (almost the only one) for the presidential candidates to divulge their campaign platform to the citizens. They therefore did not limit their efforts to mere debating among themselves. Considerable interest was shown by the public. It was indeed estimated that some forty million spectators tuned in.1

On this particular occasion the participants of the debate were candidates Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano from the PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party), an opposition party from the left; Diego Fernández de Cevallos, from the PAN (National Action Party), an opposition party from the right; Ernesto Zedillo Ponce

**1** According to a poll carried out by Ricardo Peña and Rosario Toledo, published in May 1994 in the *Semanario de política y cultura "etcetera"* (in Becerra et al. 2000: 341–342).

de León, from the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), the party in power, and the moderator, Mayté Noriega.