Chapter 7. Bestial and warm addressing forms in Mexican Spanish

Abstract

This paper explores the evolution of two names for animals, buey ‘ox’ and cabrón ‘mail goat’, that have undergone a set of important semantic and pragmatic changes since the XIXth Century. The change from offensive to warm and friendly addressing forms involved a series of semantic bleaching processes, mostly attested along the XXth Century, that generated two independent, and yet, parallel networks of meanings. The loss of negative features led to the emergence of vocative, anaphoric and discourse marking functions where the original offensive part of both words has become almost imperceivable. It is claimed that cabrón has followed the pragmaticalization path of buey yet in a more conservative manner, since its semantic network of meanings is still active in most Hispanic dialects. Yet the pragmatic evolution of buey might characterize the Mexican dialect. The semantic change of both forms is temporally located in the 1960s and it is seen as a reflex of crucial changes in Mexican contemporary society.