How polite is você (‘you’)? The pronoun of address você in European Portuguese

The pronoun você in European Portuguese has a very complex discursive behaviour. This fact has made different authors that analyzed the usage of this pronoun to disagree on its real and current value. Although the Brazilian Portuguese has specialized você as an informal pronoun, occasionally replacing tu, the European case presents contexts of usage of você that are apparently contradictory: informal address, formal address and to a certain extent pejorative address. This works aims to reflect on the usage of this pronoun in European Portuguese, from a diachronic perspective and in the light of the politeness principles. In order to do that we have obtained data from three different corpora that replicate the real usage of você throughout the 20th century, since it is from the 19th century that você, in principle, starts specializing as an informal pronoun. The results show an inexpressive usage of this politeness form and a certain polyvalence of it, as the effect of a gradual marginalisation that it has experienced for over one hundred years.