Towards a socio-diachronic overview of the addressing forms in a subject position in the Northeast region (Brazil)

In this paper, we present a socio-diachronic analysis of address forms in subject function in personal letters of the states of Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Norte, in a time frame covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The results show that in the letters of the Northeast region the prevailing subsystem of address includes the pronoun você (you) in almost every decade of the two centuries and that this framework was already well consolidated in the first half of the twentieth century, more specifically in the 1910s. The choice of other address forms is directly linked to the type of relationship established between the scribes, considering more power or more solidarity in various contacts.