There is a long tradition of associating various social meanings with the address forms (AF) tú (T) and usted (V) in Spanish (as well as in other languages where such an opposition occurs). Those who have studied these forms have attempted to demonstrate their distribution (see Lambert and Tucker 1976), what they mean (Brown and Gilman 1960), and how they are employed (Brown and Levinson 1987). They have described wide variation in all of these aspects. In this dissertation, I account for this pragmatic flexibility of AFs by identifying how their social content is contributed to an utterance. It has been suggested that the social meanings associated with AFs are presupposed (cf. Blas Arroyo 1995; Fasold 1990), conventionally implicated (cf. Potts 2007; Tsohatzidis 1992) or conversationally implicated (cf. Pedroviejo 2004). In this dissertation I provide qualitative and quantitative evidence gathered via oral interviews and written questionnaires in Madrid and Manzanares (in Ciudad Real, Castile-La Mancha), Spain, that both conventional and conversational implicature play a role in AF usage. Ninety-two informants answered questions designed to test for the characteristics of these implicatures. The methodology used to determine the pragmatic properties of T and V in this study is innovative in two important ways. First, the quantitative use of native speaker informants provides more valid results than typical studies of pragmatic meaning which rely on the intuitions of the researchers or few informants. Second, the informants were given the opportunity to provide the social content that they associated with these forms; these meanings were not predetermined by the researcher, as has often been the case in AF research. Using this methodology, I was able to identify several implicatures corresponding to the T and V forms and to determine whether they were conventional or conversational.
Following the model of conventional implicature described by Potts (2005; 2007), I demonstrate that the V form in Peninsular Spanish conventionally implicates social distance. Social distance is entailed by the form and cannot be canceled. Other content associated with this form, such as respect, are conversationally implicated. They are therefore cancelable and nondetachable.
The T form on the other hand does not entail any socially deictic content. All meanings typically associated with it, such as solidarity, arise through conversational implicatures calculated from the context and the opposition with the V form. These associations may also form part of the indexical field of AFs.
This dissertation explores an aspect of AFs that has, for the most part, been ignored in previous research. This model of the contribution of socially deictic content by AFs allows us to account for the pragmatic flexibility of these forms.