It is widely accepted that in oral exchanges with, for example, family members, friends, and co-workers, speakers of Chilean Spanish alternate between verbal tuteo and verbal voseo. In this paper, drawing on a corpus of conversational interactions between relatives and friends from Santiago, I examine the relative frequency with which these speakers use verbal voseo in relation to verbal tuteo, and I explore the social and linguistic factors that determine the variation, paying particular attention to the parameters that affect the use of verbal voseo. In addition, I compare the distributions observed here with those observed in previous studies that base their analyses on corpora that contain less natural communicative contexts. The results indicate that, in spontaneous conversational interactions, the speakers use verbal voseo with a frequency much greater than the frequency with which they use verbal tuteo as well as the frequencies observed in previous studies. This, and the fact that verbal voseo is conditioned by an interaction between the gender and the age of the speakers, as well as by the specificity of their interlocutors, shows that speakers of Chilean Spanish born in Santiago assign covert prestige to verbal voseo.
Keywords:
Sociolinguistics, variation, tuteo~voseo alternation, Spanish, Santiago de Chile
Fernández-Mallat, V. (2018). Alternation and variation of verbal tuteo and verbal voseo in the spanish of santiaguinos: A case study based on a conversational corpus. Boletín De Filología, 53(1), pp. 63–82. Retrieved from https://revistateatro.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/50637
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