Theoretical and methodological contributions to historical research on address in Portuguese and Spanish

Abstract

This glottopolitical critical review discusses the main results published in the book organized by Martin Hummel and Célia dos Santos Lopes on Forms of Address in Portuguese and Spanish from a historical perspective. The presentation of these 13 chapters and their main perspectives is divided into three parts: three chapters propose a theoretical and methodological approach to the topic, four present descriptive results in Portuguese, and six describe results in Spanish. This outstanding collaborative work disseminates research developed on these two languages, considered by the organizers as the most well-studied for their use of forms of address. Each chapter offers precise representations of the social realities of these two colonial languages based on the development of these social deixis systems. These studies are critically reviewed here from a view of language as a socially constructed object, considering linguistic description as a matter of power that transforms this social object into an active force for controlling people or resisting this control.