Dinamica sociolinguistica e historica de 'vos' en el espanol peninsular

In order to study the "voseo americano" one has to relate it to sixteenth century peninsular Spanish. The evolution of this American phenomenon led to many morphosyntactic variants, but its sociolinguistic functions are completely distinct from its source of origin.;The questions asked in this research are: (a) What are the major sociocultural and extralinguistic impacts that contributed to the total readjustment of the "Pronouns of Address" in Peninsular Spanish? (b) What is the result of the multiple coexistence of 'tu','vos' and 'vuestra merced' during the sixteenth century? (c) What sociocultural forces caused 'vos' to become a stigmatized pronoun of address before its extinction? (d) How many variants of 'vos' were created in the Spanish community before its extinction and which pronouns replaced this sociotreatment?;My hypotheses are: (a) There were many extralinguistic factors that contributed to the readjustment of the pronouns of address in peninsular Spanish, especially during the Golden Age period. The speakers and hearers had to look for the specific pronouns in order to use the correct form according to the hearer's social status. The social structure of the Iberian Peninsula was changing drastically and the speech community was always in search of the appropriate sociotreatment in order to enrich the Spanish Sociolanguage of the epoch. (b) The result of the coexistence of 'tu', 'vos' and 'vuestra merced' was the degradation of 'vos' due to semantic changes before its extinction and its replacement by 'tu' for informal treatment. 'Vuestra merced' became the form of address with the highest characteristic features for treatment of respect and consideration. (c) It is not clear why 'vos' became so degraded and stigmatized in the sixteenth century. Although there is a close relation with the deep social readjustments that were taking place on the Iberian Peninsula. (d) We classified the variants of 'vos' singular in four groups: (1) 'Tu' as the pronoun used to address God and the King vs. 'vos' to address the rest of the speakers, (2) Coexistence of 'Vos' /'tu'/'vuestra merced', (3) Use of 'vos' for insult, (4) 'Vos' as the main source to the origin of the morphosyntactic variants that the Spanish Language created in the Golden Age.;The data was obtained from different types of literary texts written from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth century. Personal letters and philosophical essays were also studied.;We analyzed each text using the symbols (X,Y,Z) in descendent order to identify the highest member of society with "X" and "Y" as the next with "Z" representing the lowest social class. Each example in this work has the social status of the speaker and the hearer indicated.;Within the scope and limitations of this study, there is no clear explanation for the multiple changes in the Spanish pronoun system. The written language is not a reliable source to obtain definite conclusions, nevertheless, this study offers information for future studies.