Vós and other pronominal forms of address (tu, você, vocês) speakers’ perceptions of Brazilian and European Portuguese

Abstract

This chapter aims to highlight some uses of pronominal address forms (tu, você, vocês and vós [‘you’ sg+pl]) in European Portuguese and compare them to Brazilian Portuguese, based on speakers’ perceptions which express their pragmatic awareness. The data were collected on the internet, from Facebook posts. An online linguistic survey on this matter was conducted to complement the data. Some examples were also collected from public speeches covering various discourse genres. Our findings show that (i) the speakers have highly varied metalinguistic and metapragmatic knowledge regarding the uses of the pronominal address systems in both varieties, (ii) knowledge of the language is supported by opinions and beliefs that value the central notion of social prestige related to a standard variety.