The Use of the Subject Pronouns tu and usted in the Spanish of the Canary Islands

The strong tendency to neutralize the opposition between tu & usted in Spanish is often put down to factors which are both linguistic (ambiguous verb forms, verb meaning, emphasis, etc) & extralinguistic (age, sex, social & cultural standing). The article approaches this tendency from a sociolinguistic viewpoint & in terms of social levels, by studying the utterances of speaking subjects from a working-class area of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). The study applies a reticular model to a corpus of interviews, first analyzing the relationship between types of variants & the various linguistic factors, & then, by using the software package SPSS, seeking a correlation between the range of variants & the social, extralinguistic information obtained in a written questionnaire. The conclusions are compared with the results of research into other characteristics of Spanish. 8 Tables, 19 References. Adapted from the source document.