Vuestra atención, por favor ‘your attention, please’. Some remarks on the usage and history of plural vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish (Peru)

This chapter documents and explains the use of the possessive form vuestro/a 'your-PL' in Cusco Spanish. This phenomenon, which has gone mostly unnoticed by scholars so far, is very unusual in Latin American Spanish. We distinguish between a formulaic use (e.g. vuestra atencion, por favor )and a highly productive strategic one, which highlights a contrastive relationship between the actions/states of the plural addressee and those from the group in which the speaker positions himself. We then discuss three hypotheses on the origins of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish related to colonial and early post-independence Spanish, examine the role of a "notional transfer" (Quechua → Spanish) and contextualize this development within the frame of the cusqueno society and its idiosyncratic mestizo identity.


Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to provide a complete description of the use of the possessive form vuestro/a 'your-PL' in Cusco Spanish (Peru) and a tentative explanation about its origins (in tackling this problem, we will take a holistic approach). Every Spanish-speaking visitor to the city of Cusco (or its surrounding area) will wonder at the occasional use of vuestro/a instead of su (as expected from American Spanish) in contexts like deseamos agradecerles por vuestra comunicación 'we wish to thank you for your communication', in a local radio program, or espero que haya sido de vuestro agrado 'I hope it has been to your liking', in the mouth of a tourist guide. This use has remained unstudied so far, and it seems to be only Caravedo (1996Caravedo ( : 161, 2005 and Rivarola (2005: 36) who mention it by making passing references to its presence in the Cusco area in highly formal or ceremonial contexts like public speeches or sermons.
This chapter will fill this gap by analyzing the different uses of vuestro/a in today's Cusco Spanish. It is based on a corpus of 23 hours of spoken interaction, recorded from local radio and TV stations between September 2016 and January 2017, as well as on a collection of 12 hours of YouTube videos, posted by local TV stations and official institutions between 2006 and 2017 (with the majority from 2014). The text types include moderated discussions, call-in programs, commercials, interviews, documentaries, press conferences, discussions and public speeches. They are all spoken texts, but following Koch & Oesterreicher's terminology, they tend to be characterized by communicative distance (Koch & Oesterreicher 1985. As selection criteria, we determined that the different formats needed to be local productions from the Cusco region with local participants and largely addressed to a local audience. This empirical basis was complemented by a selection of written examples taken from Peruvian internet forums; despite the fact that such texts are not essentially formal and may even get closer to communicative immediacy, most instances of vuestro/a correspond to cases in which the writer still maintains a certain level of formality.1 Finally, we present a diachronic explanation of the various uses of vuestro/a that relates them not only to some uses well attested throughout colonial texts but also to language contact and specific sociocultural factors. In what follows, we will consider this 'formal vuestro/a' to be primarily related to linguistic varieties (in a general way, speech styles, but see below) and to discursive aspects (more precisely, the expression of contrast, which we understand here as a semantic category that is actually shaped discursively and is continuously updated as the linguistic interaction between speaker/s and hearer/s progresses). "Deference" may certainly play a role in the usage of vuestro/a, since this takes place in speech acts that actually show respect to the addressee, including some "intrinsically polite speech acts" like giving thanks (Haverkate 1994), but the preference of vuestro/a over su is rather a question of linguistic varieties. Its selection is the result of the adaptation of actual speech to the sit-1 These examples were accessed via the RomWeb Corpus, compiled by Stefan Pfänder and his team for the project Pf699/4-RomWeb Spanisch in den Anden und Französisch in Westafrika als Kontaktvarietäten unter den Bedingungen globalisierter und computergestützter Kommunikation (funded by the DFG). As an associate member of the research group, one of the authors has access to this database. uation in which the conversation takes place; more specifically, it depends on factors such as the public character of the speech, the distance between speaker and hearer (they usually don't know each other), the fixed character of the conversation (with little room for improvisation, or for switching quickly from one conversational topic to another) -in other words, on those factors that constitute the so-called language of distance (as defined by the above-mentioned German tradition of Koch & Oesterreicher (2011: 7), which goes far beyond the selection of the appropriate second person (2P) pronouns). We are aware, however, that there are some overlapping areas between the non-structural dimension of "formality" and the semantic/pragmatic category "deference", since both are determined contextually, but nothing justifies the intertwining of variationist and semanticthat is, structural -criteria for our linguistic descriptions. In other words, we do not consider vuestro/a to be necessarily more or less "polite" than su, which can convey both solidarity and politeness as much in Cusco as elsewhere in Hispanic America; we consider that vuestro/a fits better than su into some formal contexts that we will define and illustrate in this chapter. In one sense, however, formality is combined with semantics and especially with referentiality, since the use of vuestro/a is often related to the expression of contrast between speech act participants.
The chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 will present two different uses of vuestro/a that are common in Cusco Spanish -the strategic use being the most striking -and discuss them against the background of other reported uses of vuestro/a in the specialist literature, whereas Section 3 will be devoted to their possible origins. In this section, we will bring to the fore some general aspects of the history of American Spanish, including some methodological problems, and will formulate three hypotheses about the origin of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish. These will need to be checked against more colonial texts in future research, as the size and availability of historical corpora continues to increase. We will postulate that several factors may have contributed altogether to the maintenance of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish. Section 4 will account for the productivity of the use of vuestro/a and the fact that this seems to be restricted to the Cusco region. Section 4.1 will deal with language contact and introduce the concept of discursive or notional transfer; more specifically, we suggest that the kind of contrast that is regularly conveyed by means of the inclusive/exclusive distinction in Quechua -with a clear discourse structuring role in this language -kept being expressed by means of the distinction between different plural address forms in Spanish. Section 4.2 will relate the linguistic feature analyzed here, and more generally the linguistic idiosyncrasy of Cusco, to the idiosyncrasy of Cusqueño society and the shaping of its specific identity. Finally, a summary of the major findings will close the chapter.

Formulaic vs. strategic uses
The possessive vuestro/a 'your', which, etymologically, belongs to the paradigm of vos, was brought to colonial Spanish America with both a singular and a plural meaning. However, the singular form was replaced by tu quite quickly (Díaz Collazos 2016) in those regions making use of the so-called voseo (i.e. the use of SG vos instead of tú) and the plural form was replaced by su everywhere in Hispanic America (and in the Canary Islands and some parts of Andalusia) at some point in the late colonial era (see Section 3 for further historical details). Consequently, the phenomenon analyzed here cannot be related to voseo, which is not even found in the Cusco region, even though it is widespread in many parts of Hispanic America (Bertolotti 2015: 281). In addition, the use of vuestro/a in Cusco is not reminiscent of that of European Spanish either. In Spain, it is integrated into the grammatical paradigm of the pronoun vosotros 'you-PL', which conveys solidarity as opposed to ustedes 'you-PL', which conveys politeness (Fontanella de Weinberg 1999). In Cusco, vuestro/a is always integrated into the paradigm of ustedes, so it neither combines with the object clitic os nor with the verb endings -áis/éis, which are never attested in Cusco (nor anywhere else in Hispanic America) with a plural meaning, except in some liturgical and ceremonial discourses (see Section 2.2).
In addition, vuestro/a is always attested in the function of a determiner in Cusco Spanish (it does not seem to be possible as a pronoun, e.g. *el vuestro, *las vuestras). Even so, it is quantitatively far less frequent than the possessive su, which belongs etymologically to the paradigm of ustedes. Vuestro/a is attested before abstract nouns such as preferencia, comunicación, presencia, being mostly restricted to formulaic expressions such as vuestra atención, por favor 'your attention, please', con vuestro permiso 'with your permission', gracias por vuestra deferencia 'thank you for your deference', that can be heard in formal public speeches with a plural addressee. These uses consist of routinized speech acts that serve mostly as a phatic signal, as the expression of gratitude, as farewell, and so on.2 The following examples illustrate this formulaic vuestro/a. Example (1) is taken from a pre-recorded sign-off of a radio program, a fixed formula, untied to any specific speech event which would allow for spontaneous composition and production. Example (2) contains the words that an Indigenous leader addresses to 2 Therefore, it could also be described as the fixed part of a partially schematic construction in the sense of construction grammar (e.g. Croft 2001;Goldberg 1995Goldberg , 2003Hopper 2004) with restricted productivity in the noun-slot. other members of the community during a protest demonstration, where part of the demonstration was the raising of the Cusco flag as a symbolic move, which is announced by the speaker (taken from an uncommented livestream of CTC television). The formality of his speech is clearly instantiated by him from the very beginning by addressing the various groups of authorities with señores 'gentlemen'.
( (2) 02 S: °°señores°° (-) 03 señores autoridades (--) 04 señores_e:h dirigentes (--) 05 señores_e:h (---) 06 maestros (.) kuraxkuna varayuxkuna (1.2) 07 pueblo en general/ (--) 08 con vuestro permiso (--) 09 vamos a hacer (-) 10 el izamiento (-) 11 del pabellón de nuestro bandera del tawantinsuyu/ (-) 12 que va corresponder/ (.) 'Gentlemen! Authorities, directors, teachers, superior and community authorities, people in general! With your permission, we are going to raise the flag of our banner of tawantinsuyu, which will be appropriate' However, the use of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish goes far beyond this kind of formulaic expression. Always used in formal speech, it is also possible whenever the speaker wants to make clear the contrast between the actions of the plural addressee (indicated by vuestro) and those of the group in which the speaker positions himself (usually indicated by nosotros or nuestro). We are going to call this use, which turns out to be especially productive, contrastive or strategic.
Example (3) is taken from a press conference of the regional government. In the excerpt, the governor opens the floor for questions after welcoming the audience and reading his statements.
(3) 01 C: señores perioDIstas (1.3) 02 estamos resueltos (.) nosotros (.) a respondER (-) 03 a vuestras iniciaTIvas (-) 04 a vuestras interroGANtes (--) 05 que lo haREmos (-) en las mejores instancias posibles 06 muchísimas gracias 'Ladies and Gentlemen of the media, we are determined to respond to your initiatives, your questions, which we will do in the best possible way. Thank you so much' The speaker (the regional governor) makes this public appearance to report to the public opinion that the attendant media stand in for. The subject pronoun in line 02 nosotros 'we/us' is not only placed in the postverbal position -itself considered to be especially prominent for subjects in Spanish (Adli 2011) -but also appears right-dislocated, both syntactically and phonetically (between pauses). The use of vuestras shortly after (lines 03-04) complements this (contrastive) emphatic use. Even within the general willingness to help, we could still catch a glimpse of defiance or, at least, self-sufficiency in these words. Interestingly, although the use of vuestro/a in this case clearly surpasses the kind of formulaic expressions we saw in the first examples, its appearance at the end of the governor's turn, that is, at the transition point to the questions section, still resembles the formulaic use at the end of leave-taking sequences, yet it gained a lot more combinatorial autonomy.4 In other cases, speakers try to distance themselves from the hearers -from the groups that the latter belong to or from what these groups represent -by using vuestro/a in contexts that are anything but formulaic. The following examples are taken from internet forums. In example (4) we notice the contrast of the speaker's family rules with those of the hearer, accused of belonging to a new generation of Peruvian youngsters who lack respect for their parents (vuestra casa vs. mi familia). In example (5) the reading is markedly exclusive: not only does the speaker distance himself from the hearers' states and/or actions, as in many other examples, but he also points out the fact that the hearers have to do something by themselves (por ustedes mismas): (4) O sea que por que tu papá es viejito y te llama la atención le metes un ****** a viva voz y lo mandas callar, pues no se como [sic] funciona en vuestras casas, pero en mi familia la palabra de los padres se respeta así uno sea presidente de la república los padres son los padres, y ese respeto intrínseco e inalienable se mantiene hasta el último minuto de sus vidas, así me criaron vertical. (Motorheadperu, 2008-09-15, 09:37:00;www.forosenperu.com) 'So just because your dad is old and reprimands you, you give him a loud ******* and make him shut up? Well, I don't know how it works in your homes, but in my family the parent's words are respected, even if one is the republic's president! Parents are parents, and that kind of essential and inalienable respect must be maintained until the very last minute of our lives. I was raised this way' (5) Ahora, ¿en qué contexto es asesinado Pedro Huillca?, bueno ésa es una tarea que te dejo a ti y a Nike para que la desarrollen fuera de las aulas de vuestras universidades, pero, háganla racionalmente como si estuvieran preparando vuestras tesis por uds. mismas (no vayan a Wilson)… (Tanotelo, 2008-03-18, 19 It has to be noted that the contrast between speech act participants conveyed by the strategic use of vuestro/a can adopt very different nuances in discourse. Sometimes, for instance, setting up some kind of confrontation at the beginning (lines 07 and 08 in example (6)) is used as a rhetorical discourse strategy and is therefore just a means to emphasize the consensus reached at the end. In example (6), a commissioner of the Dirección General de Comercio Exterior y Turismo publicly thanks the managers of several companies dedicated to regional tourism.
Here, the contrast between the hearers and the organization that the speaker represents is used strategically to pave the way to the conclusion that they are all in the same business and share the same interests (at the end of the example, nuestro sector 'our sector' is intended to mean 'the sector of all of us'). Thus, vuestro/a is part of a rhetorical strategy by which the speaker begins by delimiting two different groups -which also allows him to praise the efforts made by the addressed group -and goes on to highlight the collaboration between speakers and hearers (line 12) -clearly trying to strengthen it for the future. 'I am sure that you have made incredible efforts in the private sector throughout the whole year. With this money, bit by bit, you have been building your businesses for tourism and for your families. Today, the management has only one goal: recognizing this effort you are making every day for our sector' As opposed to examples (1) and (2), and partially to example (3) (compare fn. 4), examples (4) to (6) provide clear evidence that vuestro/a can be placed outside of leave-taking or turn-final expressions. This illustrates its emancipation in Cusco Spanish from the formulaic use which has occasionally been (and might still be) observed in some other parts of Hispanic America, though this is much more restricted. Thus, before we go any further in analyzing both formulaic and strategic vuestro/a in terms of their potential origins, some remarks are necessary in order to make clear the specificity of these uses when compared to other varieties of American Spanish. In the following sub-section, we will therefore describe the geolinguistic and diachronic background of plural address forms in Hispanic America. We will then identify the sources that served as discourse patterns in Cusco and determine which historical processes have shaped the use of a linguistic form that, etymologically, belongs to the paradigm of vos(otros). All in all, these considerations will prevent us from simplistic, aprioristic explanations about the history of vuestro/a and make our subsequent proposal about Cusco Spanish more understandable.

Other uses of vuestro/a reported in the literature on American Spanish
Cusco Spanish is not the only variety in Hispanic America making use of vuestro/a. Yet, the specificity of the phenomenon we analyze in this contribution clearly stands out -in both frequency and quality -among the uses of the same form in other varieties. Firstly, we have to note that vuestro/a in address formulae such as Vuestra Señoría 'Your Honor', Vuestra Excelencia 'Your Excellency', was an integral part of the very first Hispanic American parliamentary interactions (Vázquez Laslop 2012: 136) and can still be found in some institutional contexts (Fontanella de Weinberg 1999: 1419. However, in these uses, it is not a real referential possessive, that is, a possessive that relates the hearer to something that is possessed, but a part of a lexicalized deictic expression ("possessive + noun") used to directly address the hearer. Regarding possessive vuestro/a in Cusco, this means that we cannot rule out the possibility that these formulae had contributed to keeping the possessive form more accessible to speakers than any other form from the paradigm of vosotros. In point of fact, we do not yet completely understand why the possessive form is somewhat productive, whereas nothing remains from all of the other forms (i.e. the free pronoun vosotros, the object clitic os and the verbal endings -á(i)s/-é(i)s) -the functional characterization of possessives itself accounting only for part of the whole picture.5 Secondly, we have to pay special attention to the data presented by Bertolotti (2007) for Uruguay and by Wagner (1996Wagner ( /1997 for Chile. The latter points out the use of vuestro/a in formal contexts such as Señor director: Junto con saludarlo solicito a Ud. publicar mi carta en vuestro diario 'To the Director: Dear Sir, besides greeting you, I beg you to publish my letter in your newspaper'.6 These uses are quite close to our formulaic one, but, in these examples, we can find vuestro/a with both a plural and a singular meaning (in fact, according to the diachronic explanation of Bertolotti 2007: 38-39, vuestro/a was first integrated into the paradigm of the SG deferential pronoun usted and expanded later as a plural form), whereas SG vuestro/a is never attested in Cusco.7 Finally, some exceptional examples presented by Morgan & Schwenter (2016) are also of special interest, for example in a Chilean greeting card for a wedding, which on the outside says Mil Felicidades en Vuestro [emphasis added] Matrimonio 'Congratulations on your Marriage' but inside switches to su: Que la vida que hoy inician traiga a su [emphasis added] hogar la alegría de un sueño compartido 'I hope the life you start today will bring your home the happiness of a shared dream'. The use of vuestro/a in Cusco, however, is not only restricted to a few specific discourse traditions but seems instead to be accessible to any educated speaker under formal circumstances.
The abovementioned uses of vuestro/a have usually been related to an extra nuance of formality -as opposed to su -and especially to semantic disambiguation. Whatever historical factors account for the use of vuestro/a in the Cusco region (see Section 3), speakers may have actually wanted to take some advantage of it in order to avoid the referential ambiguity of possessive su, which can indeed refer to él/ella (3SG), usted (2SG, V), ellos/ellas (3PL) and ustedes (2PL, deictic, and object clitics and verbal endings are strictly grammatical (agreement markers). To the extent that possessives/relationals are not as grammatical (nor as formally bound) as, for instance, verbal endings, they are more easily perceived by speakers and therefore could be more easily adapted from other varieties (i.e. replaced by the corresponding forms in these varieties) (compare Hypothesis 2) or, for the very same reason, more easily retained (compare Hypothesis 1) -see Section 3. 6 Wagner (1996/1997: 855, 859) argues that the use of vuestro/a is a recent innovation, but he does not attempt to check this hypothesis diachronically, and it does not seem consistent with what we know about other Spanish varieties (as depicted by Bertolotti 2007). 7 From a synchronic point of view, it seems plausible to think that the formal resemblance of 1PL nuestro/a and 2P vuestro/a makes somewhat more natural the plural interpretation of the latter as well. This is especially the case if we accept that the usage of vuestro/a is not restricted to routinized speech acts and formulaic expressions (in this respect, we could still think that speakers can rely on another archetypical use of SG vuestro/a, the one in singular address formulae like Vuestra Señoría, with which they might associate any innovative use of vuestro/a). T&V).8 The other method for disambiguation is the reduplication of the possessor by a prepositional phrase "de + SN", as in su casa de usetedes (Fontanella de Weinberg 1999: 1403. As a matter of fact, this would not be the first time that the paradigm of third person pronouns in American Spanish has been considered to be functionally overloaded and, consequently, a place where linguistic change can occur more quickly. For example, the referential ambiguity of the clitic se has been pointed out as the main trigger for the overt marking of plural agreement between the object clitic lo and the lexical dative, as in the example ya se los dije (a ustedes) 'I already told you (2PL)'(Company Company 1997). However, since our historical knowledge about vosotros/ustedes in Hispanic America is quite limited (see further discussion below), we cannot even decide whether avoiding referential ambiguity was really a trigger for linguistic change (contributing to the spread of vuestro/a at some point when it might have been reinserted in the language; see Section 3, Hypothesis 3) or rather an obstacle for linguistic change (here, the alleged overgeneralization of ustedes over vosotros). In the latter case, vuestro/a should then be considered a linguistic remnant of the colonial era.
Be that as it may, referential ambiguity is by no means the main factor accounting for the presence of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish, but may have helped it take root, especially in the case of the strategic or contrastive use. This is because disambiguation also conveys an intrinsically contrastive relationship between the real referent and the other potential referents; in fact, both categories have been traditionally considered alongside one other to explain some uses of emphatic personal pronouns like overt subject pronouns in Spanish (Gili Gaya 1993: 228-229). However, vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish keeps standing out inasmuch as it is mostly used to emphasize the psychological distance with 1PL nuestro/a (be this explicit or just somehow prominent in discourse) and not with the persons that su can potentially refer to.
One last aprioristic explanation of the success of vuestro/a in Cusco should be precluded. To the best of our knowledge, the alternation between different 2PL pronouns in Spanish has never been clearly related to the semantic category of "clusivity" (Simon 2005),9 as attested in some languages that distinguish between two kinds of plural addressees: the hearers that the speaker is directly talking to 8 We follow the well-known convention of Brown & Gilman (1960), according to which T stands for address forms meaning proximity/solidarity and V stands for address forms meaning distance/politeness. 9 Eberenz (2000) is aware of these two possible meanings of 2PL pronouns. Even though it may seem, at first, quite intuitive to postulate such a semantic difference in order to account for the alternation between vos 'you-PL' and vos otros (lit. 'you (and) others' in Late Middle Age Spanish), the linguistic data do not support such a hypothesis (Eberenz 2000: 74-83).
(or even watching) during his/her speech act (exclusive reading) and the hearers as a semantic class, i.e. being associated with other people that the speaker considers he/she shares some properties with (generalizing or inclusive reading), as when a teacher speaks to his/her students, referring not only to them but also to any student in general. There is nothing in our data about Cusco Spanish suggesting such a relation either. Clusivity will play an important role in our argument, but this will be related to the inclusion of the speaker him/herself and not to the inclusion of absent addressees.
Consequently, until otherwise proven, we will continue to consider the usage of vuestro/a in the Cusco region to be unique in Spanish dialectology, even more clearly as regards its strategic use. Perhaps we should mention, however, that the example below from Fontanella de Weinberg (1999: 1404) rendering the words of the governor of Tucumán (Argentina) resembles our examples from Cusco: He bajado para dar la cara y hablar con ustedes como corresponde. Quiero manifestarles mi absoluta solidaridad con vuestra situación.
'I came down to face up to you and talk to you as it is good custom. I want to express my absolute solidarity with your situation' As for the nominative pronouns, we know that there were five different forms throughout long periods of the colonial era. Indeed, we find not only vosotros and ustedes -the latter is documented in colonial texts in 1662 for the first timeas a plural of singular vos (Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 262), but three more forms: (1) plural vos (i.e. the form without -otros), which is still attested in the 17th century, even though its use has been sometimes considered to be marginal since the late 15th century (Eberenz 2000: 59, 75, 79); (2) third person plural ellos/as used for addressing (Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 254); and (3) vuestras mercedes (the etymological source of the newer pronoun ustedes) which did not disappear immediately after ustedes appeared).
PL vos seems to function as a variant of vosotros, which was used much more frequently in the colonial texts. In Huamán Poma we find some fragments in direct speech with both vos and vosotros. In example (7)  'You, Indian chiefs, you have to listen to me as your father and encomendero. Let's live well, because I am better than a father and a magistrate. You belong to my father the Conqueror. That is why you have to give me servants who make good walls in the estancias and good houses and you have to give me Indians for work as ranchers and shepherds.' The variety illustrated here can be considered very close to that of Cusco (see also example (8a)). The use of each pronoun must have undergone some kind of social and/or discursive specialization, but there was also some space for interchangeability, an envelope of variation (Labov 1994) that has remained undescribed to this day. Let us consider two excerpts (examples (8a) and (8b)) from a Colombian document (written in Cartagena de Indias, 1694), which consists of the court order against a freed mixed heritage slave (mulato) supposed to have conspired with Black slaves against the local authorities (this unedited document is partially transcribed and commented in Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 463-473). In both cases, the scribe renders what the mulato admits to have said to a group of Black slaves. Thus, the speaker and the addressees are the same in both cases, and so is the general speech act (advice -more specifically, advice to stay quiet -even though it is mixed with a reproval in the first case and with a commissive act in the second): (8) a. PL vos → ¡no seáis locos! ¡quitáos de eso! porque vos tenéis buen amo y si avéis de ser libres, a de ser cuando Dios quiera.
'Don't be silly and forget about it! Because you have a good master and if you are supposed to get your freedom sometime, it will just be when God wants it.' b. ustedes → ¡no es tiempo aora de esso! yo avisaré a ustedes.
'This is not the right time for it! I will let you know' The possessive referential system consisted of only two forms: su (the possessive form of the free variants ustedes, vuestras mercedes and ellos/as) and vuestro/a (the possessive form of vosotros and PL vos). However, if we consider examples (8a) and (8b), we can also expect the same kind of (almost free) variation to happen as regards possessives.
Recent research tends to concede that ustedes was never marked for formality in colonial Spanish (Bertolotti,in this volume,309,311). In fact, even SG usted seems to have been used for a wide spectrum of functions that do not always fit well into the general label of "formality" since it is first documented in 17th century American Spanish (Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 251-253; Moser 2010). Likewise, we do not know either to what (if any) extent vosotros was ever really marked for "solidarity". Even though it is obvious that at some point in the history of American Spanish -most notably during the first decades of the 20th century -ustedes finally positioned itself as the only plural pronoun of address (with the exceptions explained above), the use of vosotros may have been very different from what we find in current European Spanish. Consequently, the alleged "neutralization" of T and V in the plural may have never happened in American Spanish (see also García Godoy 2012: 130-131, 140).
In what follows, we will introduce three potential diachronic explanations, without expressing a preference for any of them. They are, to some extent, compatible with one another but none of them (not even all three altogether) would on its own be enough to account for the success of vuestro/a in Cusco without paying attention to language contact and to the cultural aspects that will be outlined in Section 4.

Hypothesis 1: The use of PL vuestro/a results from its resistance to the overgeneralization/paradigmaticization of ustedes, possibly after SG vuestro/a had resisted the paradigmaticization of tú for some time
The scarcity of texts showing references to a plural addressee leads us first to take a look at 2SG pronouns in other texts that were written in colonial Cusco.
Here, what stands out most is the frequent use of SG vuestro/a. Let us consider the following private letter (example (9)) written by a father to his daughter in 1655 (the linguistic forms belonging to the paradigm of tú are in italics, while those belonging to SG vos are in bold): (9) Hija de mi corasón: Holgaréme en el alma ésta te alle con mui entera salud. In this letter, we find 13 verb forms in the second person: ten of these seem to agree with tú, whereas only three agree with vos. Due to the lack of graphic accents in the manuscripts, there are no certain grounds, however, for deciding whether these verbs are conjugated in agreement with tú or with vos (des could also descend from the second person plural form, i.e. from dedes -after lost of intervocalic /d/ -or from an hypothetical intermediate form déis -thus, via monophthongization). The only exceptions are the forms as dado and escríbeme, whose morphology undoubtedly points towards the 2SG tú. There are 12 object clitics te and only one os (guardaos), which is used to introduce an important part of the letter (the main admonition). There is only one explicit subject pronoun, vos, which is placed postverbally and, as regards its role in information structure, carries a contrastive focus: no tenías vos la culpa, sino es yo (see also Octavio de Toledo y Huerta 2008, about the adversative connector sino es, which became quite common in Spanish during the 17th century). The data commented on so far lead to the following conclusion: the use of SG vos (and the other forms of its paradigm) is much less frequent, and consequently much more marked, than the use of tú; when vos does appear in the text, it is clearly emphatic. This state of affairs looks consistent with a variety that we assume to be transitioning from voseo to tuteo. We know that the former had spread out as a T-pronoun all over the Spanish-speaking world during the 16th century, when tú started to be restricted to just a few social functions like when addressing children or slaves (compare Anipa 2001; Bentivoglio 2003; Carrera de la Red & Álvarez Muro 2004), whereas the latter must have prevailed in Cusco at a later stage of the colonial era (the Cusco region, unlike some enclaves of Southern Peru, has no remnants of SG vos today). However, the possessive tu is used only four times in the entire text, against nine instances of vuestro/a(s), which is employed more frequently both with an emphatic function (such as when the possessive is postnominal: por vida vuestra) and, most importantly, in its neutral use (as in vuestra madre).
Elucidating the motivation for the partial alternation between (the forms belonging to the paradigm of) tú and (those belonging to the paradigm of) vos becomes a challenge for which we do not yet have a clear response.11 Be that as it may, it is clear that, even when the use of tú had already become generalized, the possessive vuestro/a could still show up in some discourses. We could, thus, postulate a longer survival of possessives when the functional sphere of the pronominal paradigm they belong to is "invaded" by other pronouns, as when tú gained ground over vos and finally pushed it back in Colonial Peruvian Spanish. We wonder, then, whether PL vuestro/a paralleled SG vuestro/a in its longer resistance to a process of pronominal substitution: in our case, the pronoun ustedes, which is increasingly used from the second half of the 17th century onwards. As a matter of fact, the possessive form has already been proven to also persist longer in the process of displacement of vosotros by ustedes in Andalusian Spanish (Lara Bermejo 2015: 438). Another example of possessives resisting the invasion of other pronominal forms for some time is the use of 1PL nuestro/a in the letters written by the king to the colonial governors at a time when the subject pronouns, object clitics and verbal endings had already adopted the grammatical paradigm of yo (see Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 189-192 about the remnants of the so-called majestatic plural). Lastly, we 11 As has become clear, emphasis cannot be the only reason. Utterances like Si acasso te hallare vuestro marido, agasajaldo, qu'es tu espos [o] 'If your husband happened to find you, serve him well because he is your husband', may give us an additional hint to understand the variation between tú and vos. The first part of this utterance (a conditional clause followed by its apodosis) conveys a supposition, a possible scenario that can or cannot be realized in the future, whereas the second clause conveys an already proven fact 'he is actually your husband'. If we now read the rest of the text from this perspective, we discover that, in other cases, the utterances including the forms of vos contain conditionals, actions/states that are oriented to the future or reflect the speaker's wishes (the modal verb querer 'to want' is especially present in the text). This kind of modal reading seems to be absent in the actions rendered with tú. cannot exclude the possibility that vuestro/a expanded from SG to PL, as happened in 19th and 20th century Uruguayan Spanish (Bertolotti 2007), the main objection being the fact that the colonial use of SG vuestro/a in Cusco (as in example (9) above, a letter written by a father to his daughter) was not marked for formality.

Hypothesis 2: The use of vuestro/a results from its idiomaticization from legal dispositions and other official directive documents
Throughout the entire colonial period we find vos in directive documents (documentos dispositivos, in the tradition of Hispanic Diplomatics), that is, in the official documents written from a superior position or institution to an inferior one (Real Díaz 1991) -for instance, when the king writes to governors or Audiencias (i.e. in the so-called cédulas reales 'royal decrees'), when governors write to mayors or to local commissioners, or when the cabildos (town councils) promote someone to an official position (Fontanella de Weinberg 1989: 114;Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 236-237). This leads us to two different types of vos that have to be studied separately. Fontanella de Weinberg (1992) refers to the polysemy of vos, whereas other authors speak of the "formal" or "reverential" vos as opposed to the common vos, although without further theoretical discussion. We consider the best way to catch these differences is to distinguish, according to the testimony in example (10) below, a "personal" vos, which was used in everyday's linguistic interactions, from an "official" vos, which was determined by the institutional role of the speakers and their addressees and found in very specific discourse traditions, such as those that belong to the institutional dialogue in the Hispanic colonial world. This differentiation between the interpersonal and the institutional dimensions of vos was perfectly known and explicitly regulated in the most important exponent of Spanish Colonial Law, the so-called Laws of the Indies, published in 1681 (Gutiérrez Maté 2013: 237; 2014: 69-72): (10) Qvando Las Audiencias despacharen mandamientos por Nos el Presidente y Oidores, traten en ellos de vos á los Iuezes de Provincia, por hablar de Tribunal superior á Iuez Inferior, porque no se ha de considerar esto segun las personas, sino á los oficios, que exercen.
'When the courts passed writs on behalf of Ours, President and Hearers, they must address provincial judges with vos, since a superior court is speaking to an inferior judge, because this must not be related to the person but to the person's position.' Both types of vos also differed formally in three important aspects: (1) the object counterpart of subject vos in its institutional use was always (v)os (the change to te took place only in the case of personal vos: Díaz Collazos 2016: 35-61); (2) possessives remained in their etymological form as well (vuestro/a), without changing to tu, as occurred in the case of personal vos; and (3) most importantly, official vos could be used both with a singular and a plural meaning. To illustrate the latter, we reproduce here an excerpt of a royal disposition (1561) addressed to the religious authorities of the Andean provinces of Cusco, La Plata (today's Sucre) and Quito (example (11)); in addition, to specifically show the use of PL vuestro/a, we cite the beginning of a royal letter to the authorities of the City of The Kings (current Lima) (1564) (example (12)): The formal characteristics of official vos were maintained throughout the entire colonial period, as can be easily confirmed by looking at the cédulas (legal orders on behalf of the king) written during the 18th century (Muro Orejón 1969), including those written to the Audiencia Real of Cusco, which became independent from Lima at the very end of the colonial era (1787) (Mejías Álvarez 1995). These different types of dispositive documents influenced each other in such a way that the documents written by the king to the civil and religious authorities such as bishops, regional governors and the Real Audiencias served as a model for the latter when they had themselves to write legal directives to other subordinated local authorities, and so on. That is why several burocratic expressions were repeated and transmitted throughout the entire official correspondence in the Hispanic colonies. Finally, this sort of "officialese" was, to some extent, received by ordinary people, as when municipal edicts were read in public in the town squares. In addition, all over the Hispanic colonies, some critical cédulas were expected to be read in public: (13) y para que lo susodicho sea público y notorio y ninguno pueda pretender ignorancia, se pregone públicamente esta nuestra cédula en las ciudades y pueblos que pareciere de la dicha provincia de Tierra Firme, y de la publicación de ella se tome testimonio en manera que haga fe. (Konetzke 1958: 490).
'and in order for all the aforesaid to be public and well-known and in order for no one to be able to pretend unawareness, I command this royal disposition to be publicly read in all affected cities and towns of the aforementioned province of Tierra Firme and I command this public reading to be registered by official scribe.' The hypothesis, that some expressions that were first typical in official documents later became widespread in American Spanish, has been mentioned, though not really explained, by Cuervo (1954: 553, 557) and Guitarte (1969) (compare Carrera de la Red & Gutiérrez Maté 2009: 44). In our view, the expansion of elements whose usage was originally restricted to officialese has to be seen as an idiomaticization process (Ger. Idiomatisierung) in the sense of Koch (1997), that is, a process according to which a given linguistic expression (word, structure, etc.) escapes from one specific discourse tradition (or from a reduced set of discourse traditions) and becomes widespread in the language, thus becoming an integral part of the "historical-idomatic" rules of a given language (Coseriu 1982). To put it more simply, an expression that was formerly used only in texts with very specific characteristics becomes widely idiomatic (even though it may still be stylistically marked). To cite another example, in Gutiérrez Maté (2015: 189) it was postulated that the construction servirse (de) + INF (lit. 'to be served to do something'), which is used in many parts of Hispanic America, including the Cusco region, for polite requests in public speeches or in different formal circumstances with the meaning of 'to do the favor of doing something' (or just 'do something, please'),12 was the result of another idiomaticization from colonial documents 12 One example (also from the Cusco region) will suffice to illustrate this use: Señores pasajeros, sírvanse abordar su tren por las puertas de embarque señaladas en su boleto 'Dear Passengers, please get on your train through the boarding gate as specified on your ticket'.

Hypothesis 3: The use of vuestro/a results from the revitalization of vosotros (and its entire paradigm) in 19th century American Spanish
The revitalization of vosotros (and its etymological paradigm) in (post-)independence American Spanish has been pointed out before (for a short summary, see Bertolotti, in this volume, 299-301), as has been the idea that ustedes was never a real V-pronoun in Colonial Spanish but a pronoun of address with a wider spectrum of uses (See above, 330). As regards the distribution of vosotros and vuestro/a, Frago Gracia (2011: 57) states that these forms can be found in almost any text type at the time of independence, most especially in official texts -generally written in a very traditional style, in doctrinal books or those characterized by erudition, and in those marked by solemnity, which, interestingly, may also strive for an emotional approach to the addressees, trying to encourage and persuade them.13 Our claim is that prior to that time (say, during the last decades of the colonial era) the use of vosotros and its entire paradigm had become restricted to very few discourse types but had not disappeared completely, so it could experience a more or less ephemeral "revitalization" during the 19th century. This was partly because of an imitative and reinterpretative process of some linguistic patterns from European Spanish (see further below), partly because of the need for new linguistic strategies in order to shape the new discourses (most especially, at the political level) that were brought about by the birth of the new Hispanic American nations. Unfortunately, our knowledge of Colonial Spanish at the turn of the 19th century is still limited, but it seems plausible to assume that the use of vosotros was, at best, obsolescent in ordinary conversation and had become restricted to just a few types of formal discourses. Amongst these, we find not only official docu ments but also some other texts that we consider to be paradigmatic such as the catechism Explicación de la doctrina cristiana acomodada a la capacidad de los negros bozales (1797), written by Nicolás Duque de Estrada in Cuba. In the preface 13 "Aunque el pronombre vosotros, y correlativamente el posesivo vuestro, puede encontrarse en no importa qué texto de la época de la Independencia, lo cierto es que su aparición se da con mayor profusión, incluso con regularidad, en los de carácter oficial, de estilo por lo general muy tradicional, en los doctrinales o marcados por la erudición, y en aquellos envueltos de solemnidad, que también pueden buscar, curiosamente, el acercamiento emocional a los destinatarios cuyos ánimos se desea enfervorizar y conquistar […]". 'Although the pronoun vosotros, and in correlation the possessive vuestro, can appear in no matter what text of the Independence era, it is certain that its use is more common, even regular, in texts with official character, which in general have a very traditional style, in doctrines or in texts characterized by their erudition, and in such texts involved in ceremonial situations, which curiously can also achieve emotional reconciliation to the addressees, seeking to lift and conquer their spirit' (Frago Gracia 2011: 57). to the edition of 1823, which is addressed to other priests working in the evangelization of Black slaves in Cuba, the author constantly uses vosotros (example (14)), whereas he only uses ustedes in the dialogues rendering prototypical interactions with slaves (example (15)).14 Since the main stylistic principle governing these dialogues is, as the author states, to abandon "el uso de discursos elevados, de palabras cultas y rebuscadas" 'the use of elaborated discourses and erudite, stilted words' (Dedicatoria, iv), which he even accomplishes by using foreigner talk, it becomes clear that ustedes was not stylistically high, while vosotros was valid for at least some formal contexts. Interestingly, for the most stereotyped discourses like the final reverential words, he employs the abbreviation Vds., which, since the letter m is lacking (as opposed to the abbreviation Vmds.), we tend to read as ustedes rather than as vuestras mercedes (compare García Godoy 2012: 122, 143) (example (16)). If this is correct, we might be obliged to distinguish between an idiomatic, ordinary use of ustedes and a formal or reverential use, which seems to be restricted to just a few formulaic expressions at the turn of the 19th century and, most importantly, already used with the possessive vuestro/a (see vuestro siervo in example (16) 'What are you doing here? I order you two to make friends soon' To further complicate things, ustedes could occasionally combine with the paradigm of vosotros (in this example: les… hagáis…). However obsolescent the use of vosotros (and the different forms of its grammatical paradigm) may have been, it was still known to some extent, as the examples (14)- (17) have proven, so the well-known impulse of vosotros during the early postcolonial era could take the floor more easily. It is relatively common in several journals of the new American nations (e.g. when editors address their readers) and it even passed into the most patriotic texts such as national anthems. The following excerpt comes from the Mexican anthem (written in 1853): (18) Mexicanos, al grito de guerra el acero aprestad y el bridón. Y retiemble en sus centros la Tierra, al sonoro rugir de el cañón. Y retiemble en sus centros la Tierra, al sonoro rugir de el cañón! 'Mexicans, at the cry of war, make ready the steel and the bridle, and may the Earth tremble at its core at the resounding roar of the cannon. and may the Earth tremble at its core at the resounding roar of the cannon!' Bertolotti (2007: 24-27) accurately explains how during the 19th century the typically European pronoun vosotros15 could have been considered somewhat special and consequently reinterpreted for formality in at least some parts of Hispanic America. As we know, the manifold outlook of Hispanic America towards the old metropole and its linguistic varieties from the very first decades after independence gave birth to different, even opposing, attitudes (Guitarte 1991) that, unfortunately, we do not yet really understand in their linguistic praxis.
In other words, we do not know to what extent this process may have changed the linguistic profile of Hispanic America, that is, which linguistic features were involved16 and, most importantly, how exactly the architecture (Coseriu 1982) of varieties (especially, as regards its situational marking and the opposition language of immediacy/language of distance) was reorganized at that time in the different Hispanic American nations.

Understanding the productivity and the geolinguistic distribution of vuestro/a
The three hypotheses introduced in the previous section are to a great extent compatible with one other. For instance, the idiomaticization of vuestro/a from official colonial documents (Hypothesis 2) looks even more plausible, as the SG possessive form had formerly become successful (at least for some time) in resisting the paradigmatization of tú (Hypothesis 1) and as the whole paradigm of vosotros was revitalized in postcolonial American Spanish (Hypothesis 3). However, even combining all three hypotheses, they fail to fully account for the fact that today's use of vuestro/a, as we have described it in Section 2, seems to be mostly limited to the Cusco region. It is therefore necessary to have a closer look at the 16 There are other linguistic features taking root in American Spanish that might have followed the pattern of European Spanish. Amongst these, we should mention the so-called leísmo de cortesía 'polite le'. The emergence of this use in American Spanish has not been clearly defined yet but it is supposed to be fairly old, even though it may have developed quite recently in some regions (Dumitrescu & Branza 2012). It consists of the use of le(s) instead of lo(s) as the object clitic counterpart of usted(es) (NGLE §16.8d). Despite its traditional designation (Lorenzo Ramos 1981), this feature seems to be related, first, to the stylistic dimension: Sedano (2011: 177), who describes this use in Venezuela, considers it to be "refinado". The sociostylistic history of this use in American Spanish resembles the history of the feature analyzed throughout this chapter; however, especially for the Andes, there are issues that would require further research. Just to mention one, the use of polite (or refined) le is very significant in Quito (Dumitrescu & Branza 2012: 679), but contrasts with the opposite use in other parts of Ecuador. Many Ecuadorians have overgeneralized the clitic le for all kinds of objects (also feminine); for these speakers, "in more prestigious registers, the use of lo (and la) in direct address, corresponding to usted, carries more respect than le, the inverse of trends found elsewhere in Latin America" (Lipski 1994: 251). In light of the above, special attention has to be paid to the clitic pronouns all over the Andes, since many vernaculars have been deeply restructured by language contact with Quechua, Aymara and other languages. sociocultural idiosyncrasies of the Cusco Region in order to come closer to a valid explanation. In this section, we will analyze the linguistic feature described here from the perspective of cultural and language contact. More precisely, we claim that a notional transfer based on the Quechuan inclusive/exclusive distinction, which is deeply ingrained in Quechuan grammar (specifically, in the pronominal system, including possessives/relationals) and fully utilized by Quechua speakers to make discourse progress in one or another direction (Howard 2007), could have determined the success of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish. In Section 4.2, we will elaborate on this explanation by adopting a more general perspective that discusses the emerging of an idiosyncratic Cusqueño identity, which is behind the linguistic idiosyncrasy of Cusco Spanish.

Language contact: notional transfer from Quechua
Interesting obervations on notional transfer have already been made in a significant number of studies on language contact, which show how languages can influence each other without borrowing any explicit forms, but transfering notional content. For example, Babel & Pfänder (2014) prove the effectiveness of this concept with a case study on the use of the past perfect (había + past participle) in Andean Spanish, which, aligning with comparable functions of Quechuan grammar, has incorporated a creative use as a mirative/deictic marker to the standard Spanish reading as past perfect tense. According to them, "[t]he effects of language contact are the accumulation of communicative routines or habits, which speakers play on as they engage in creative language use" (Babel & Pfänder 2014: 254). This approach draws, to a great extent, on two other existing sources that we will also summarize here: (1) Jarvis & Pavlenko's (2008) plea for the importance of "subjective" similarity (similarity from an interlocutor's perspective) to facilitate transfer -also between typologically dissimilar languages ("objective" [dis-] similarity from a linguist's perspective); and (2) Johanson's code-copying framework (e.g. 2008). The first claims that the key to understanding language users' behaviour in language contact is to focus on the "similarities (and differences) that the L2 user believes or perceives to exist between the languages" (Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008: 178-179, our emphasis). Thus, speakers look out for forms, structures, meanings, functions or patterns in the target language that they perceive to be similar to a corresponding feature of the source language (perceived similarity). On the other hand, they assume the presence of a counterpart in the L2 of a linguistic feature that they know from the source language (assumed similarity). Jarvis & Pavlenko claim that such interlocutors' beliefs about the congruences between languages fuel language transfer, also between typologically distant languages like Quechua and Spanish.
The second, Johanson's code-copying model, provides a detailed framework for different possibilities on how parts of languages can be combined or copied selectively. He distinguishes between four types of copies: combinatorial, material, semantic and frequency-based (Johanson 2008). Typical cases of combinatorial copies are loan translations or syntactic calques, in which, generally speaking, a structure or pattern of the target language is partially rearranged to fit into a scheme from the model language: for example, whereas (S)OV word order would be considered exotic to the general Spanish grammar, speakers of Quechuainfluenced Spanish frequently make use of it, though most especially in emphatic contexts (which does not fit perfectly into the Quechuan pattern, where SOV is the unmarked word-order) (Pfänder et al. 2009: 102-108). Material copies include not only loanwords but also phonological or morphological copies, for example, the incorporation of the Quechuan attenuative suffix -ri into the imperative paradigm of Bolivian Spanish (Pfänder et al. 2009: 242). Semantic (or functional) copies overlay the semantic content (in its broader sense) of one language with the semantics of the other, as when speakers of Andean Spanish, adapting the function of Quechua subordination suffixes, use the Spanish gerund construction mostly for adverbial subordination (Pfänder et al. 2009: 139-147;Soto Rodríguez & Dankel, in press). Lastly, frequency copies adopt the usage of a feature from the model code in the corresponding feature of the target code: a well-known example is the higher percentage of explicit subject pronouns in the Spanish spoken in the US because of language contact with English (Silva-Corvalán 1994). Furthermore, Johanson (2008: 62) stresses the fact that copies cannot, by definition, be identical to their models. Most typically, the semantic functions of copies have not reached the same stage of grammaticalization as their models and their use is often pragmatically determined (Johanson 2008: 70).
Finally, a complementary approach is the cognitive one adopted by Slobin (2016), who brings up the concept of "thinking for speaking". He considers contact phenomena as the long-term result of framing communicative interactions in different languages. He follows Levelt's (1989) psycholinguistic model, who distinguished a "conceptualizer" planning the forthcoming speech act from a "formulator" encoding the message on a lexical, grammatical and phonological level, and he further elaborates on this model by defining how it works in a language contact scenario. In this case, the conceptualizer becomes attentive to those meaning areas that are regularly marked in the contact languages and accomodates the linguistic outcome by providing formulation strategies in both languages. In other words, speakers who have to switch between languages frequently conceptualize the world in one language whilst speaking in another. This leads to contact-induced changes when speakers accommodate their "thinking for speaking" from the source language to the target language. To illustrate this, Slobin presents two contact scenarios (one of them being Spanish-Quechua language contact) where the language lacking grammatical marking for evidentiality has created new means for doing so out of the forms available in the target language.17 To sum up, whereas Johanson (2008) takes an empirical-observational perspective on a well-established contact variety, Jarvis & Pavlenko (2008) study the L2 accquisition process itself by focusing on speakers' assumptions and perceptions about the L2, and so does Slobin (2016) from a more cognitive viewpoint (more specifically, by focussing first on the dynamics in language processing mechanisms that enable contact-induced change). What is at stake in all of these approaches is the way in which speakers' communicative routines, which work on a cognitive level but have been shaped culturally, affect their understanding of how target languages work and give rise to linguistic outcomes in such a way that they are contextually and socially adequate. All approaches show how speakers creatively operationalize the potential of the available linguistic forms to convey their semantic and pragmatic needs in context-dependent ways. These studies relate to ours in that the strategic use of vuestro/a seems to be reflecting the same kind of contact-induced change: more specifically, the creative operationalization (reinterpretation) of a Spanish linguistic form to convey a communicative routine that is fully grammaticalized in Quechua.
As stated at the very beginning, scholars, even those working on Andean Spanish, have overlooked the use of vuestro/a in Cusco for several reasons.18 However, some studies have already noticed a special (or strategic) use of other possessives and personal pronouns working as emphatic markers for delimiting/ 17 For his Spanish-Quechua case study, Slobin (2016) limits himself to the already mentioned case of the Spanish pluperfect, which has been reinterpreted as an evidentiality/mirativity marker of unwitnessed information; however, a similar observation can be made for the development of the Andean Spanish reportative marker dizque, which is functionally modeled parallel to the Quechua reportative suffix (Dankel 2015). 18 Merma Molina (2007: 263), who studies language contact phenomena in Cusco Spanish, including possessives, cites an example of vuestro, but in her chapter on reported speech not possessives. However, it has to be noted that her account is selective, not exploratory (she mainly focuses on phenomena that already have broad recognition in the research community). Howard's (2007) approach to data collection (individual interview on community internal topics conducted by herself as an outsider) hardly allows for the appearance of 2PL personal or possessive determiners. In the case of Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012), the data collection contains a broader spectrum of text types, however the data is from the Bolivian variety of Andean Spanish, where, to the best of our knowledge, the phenomenon has not yet been documented. confronting personal relations in the Cusco region, both as regards Spanish and Quechua. For example, Howard (2007), whose work is devoted to the cultural identities of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia by means of a Critical Discourse Analysis of language attitudes, observes the use of nosotros 'we' as a strategy for opposing the voices of speakers and hearers amongst her informants from the Cusco region when speaking Spanish (Howard 2007: 76-77). This is even more true for regional Quechua, where the same discursive strategy is implemented by means of the grammatical differentiation of inclusive and exclusive 1PL pronouns and possessives (Howard 2007: 376-377). In fact, Southern Quechua, including the variety spoken in Cusco, happens to have the most elaborate system of personal reference markers within Quechuan dialectology (Adelaar & Muysken 2004: 212). If we now focus on possessives, we find the following distinctions (Table 1): Moreover, on a conceptual level, possessives actually convey a series of associations between persons and entities participating in a communicative event that contribute to shaping speakers' actual discourse, as Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012) have already shown on the basis of Quechua and Bolivian Spanish (they even prefer the label of relationals over possessives). Their analysis illustrates very clearly how Andean speakers use strategies of possessive/relational marking in the same way in both languages by relying on the same notional concepts and underlying cultural routines, even though the exact surface strategies are substantially different: las relaciones o vínculos indicados por estos morfemas pueden constituir recursos discursivos importantes para, según la situación, expresar la inclusión o la exclusión y el acercamiento o el alejamiento de un hablante respecto a determinados aspectos; lo cual, a su vez, permite a un hablante atribuir matices afectivos y despectivos a las asociaciones.
[…] Todos estos valores y usos también se aplican a las muestras de español que hemos analizado. Este hecho nos hace pensar que parece tratarse de un concepto común para ambos grupos de hablantes y que lo único que cambia, según el caso, es la forma. Esta última está condicionada por las posibilidades y recursos que ofrece cada lengua. (Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat 2012: 84) 'the relationships or connections conveyed by these morphemes turn out to be critical discursive means to express, according to the situation, the inclusion or exclusion [of the hearers] and the speakers' proximity or distance to different aspects, which, in addition, enables speakers to assign affective or derogatory nuances to the association process.
[…] All these uses and nuances apply [not only to Quechua but also] to the Spanish samples we have analyzed. This fact makes us realize that there is just one concept for both speakers' groups and that the only thing that really changes is the [linguistic] form, which is strongly conditioned by the possibilities and expressive means of each language.' Both Howard (2007) and Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012) emphasize the critical role of establishing clear relations and associations between persons and entities in order for speakers belonging to the Southern Andean culture to construct their discourse. These associations are formally conveyed by the Quechuan possessive/relational system with its clusivity distinction in the 1PL, but this kind of morphological distinction is not possible in Spanish. Nevertheless, the clusivity distinction could be transferred into (at least some varieties of) Andean Spanish on a notional level. Speakers unconsciously probed for available strategies in Spanish were able to emulate, to a certain extent, the original distinction. By so doing, they drew upon other fixed discursive routines in the target language (in our case, within the scope of address forms) that are also functional in the same context types (in our case, interactional discourses in which the relation between speech act participants has to be clear). The strategic use of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish should be seen as one of these routines.
In fact, the communicative domain of inclusion/exclusion of the hearer and that of addressing belong together in the way that languages codify the involvement or the active role of hearers in speakers' actions or beliefs. Moreover, there might be some degree of correlation between both domains, which often seem to appear in inverse proportion: Southern Quechua displays the clusivity distinction but lacks the distinction based on politeness addressing,19 whereas the opposite is true in the case of Spanish, which lacks any differentiation in clusitivity but displays a relatively complex system of pronouns of address (even more so in colonial times). This correlation is not only characteristic of both languages from our contact scenario, but also of many other languages, as a look at the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) and more specifically at its features 39A ("inclusive/exclusive distinction in independent pronouns", Cysouw 2013) and 45A ("politeness distinctions in pronouns", Helmbrecht 2013) can quickly confirm.20 If such a correlation between the two domains could be typologically confirmed, we could even think that they are somewhat associated in speakers' minds. In a language contact scenario, therefore, speakers could unconsciously consider a linguistic feature from one of these domains to be the natural replacement for a feature from the other domain or even, according to our understanding of notional transfer, adapt the linguistic forms of one of these domains in the L2 to the needs of the other domain in the L1.
These considerations allow us to think of the strategic use of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish as an indirect compensation strategy for the missing differentiation between an inclusive and an exclusive form in Southern Quechua. Spanish has only one linguistic form for the 1PL POSS, which makes a direct transfer from Quechua impossible. Since speakers did feel the need to fill the functional gap left by the missing clusivity distinction in Spanish, they searched for an alternative way to keep on assessing their role by opposing the hearers and they found it in the linguistic variable 2PL. Vuestro/a, which had never disappeared completely from American Spanish, was then fully utilized to convey not only the meaning of 'your-PL' but also the meaning of 'not our'. Actually, vuestro/a's informational role (in its strategic use) is that of a contrastive focus that makes explicit the opposition between the 2PL and the 1PL. Speakers took advantage of the variation in 2PL possessives between vuestro/a and su by using the former to convey the opposite meaning to the exclusive 1PL, whereas the latter remained in its canonical use as a referential 2PL (and as a 3PL, which could also be defined as the opposite of the inclusive 1PL). Su was itself not suitable for such a creative use, since it was already functionally overloaded and, when functioning as a 2PL, more widespread than vuestro/a (restricted to some discourse traditions). 20 The comparison of the maps for both features brings to light some interesting correspondences in several language areas: e.g. European languages systematically lack the inclusive/exclusive distinction and display the politeness distinction, whereas Australian languages regularly exhibit the first distinction but, in most cases, not the second. In addition, there are several languages with negative values for both variables and only a few with positive values for both of them (the Khoisan language Khoekhoe being one of these very few languages). The correlation between the two features (which we mention here only speculatively) is by no means perfect but it should not to be overlooked. When speaking Spanish, the creative use of a contrastive 2PL meaning 'you' as opposed to 'us' enables speakers to structure their discourse on the basis of the contrast between them and their interlocutor/s (as regards actions, beliefs, opinions, and so on), that is, on the basis of the same discourse structuring principle for which speakers used the exclusive 1PL in Quechua.
We would surely go too far if we claimed that language contact is the main reason for the success of vuestro/a in Cusco, particularly as it does not account for the fact that this feature seems to be limited to just a small part of the contact zone between Spanish and Southern Quechua (although more empirical research about other varieties is still required). However, we do claim that the phenomenon described here would not have taken root in the region without language contact. To us, understanding properly how notional transfer works may solve, partially at least, the problem of the geographical spread of strategic vuestro/a (see Section 4.2 for a complementary explanation). As Dankel (2015) has already proven for the Spanish/Southern Quechua scenario, languages offer different structural potentialities to express a given notional category, so interlocutors in different regions -even when contact ingredients remain the same -find different ways to operationalize such a category out of the available linguistic forms. Experiences with categories in multilingual scenarios are first individual, used locally and, finally, may succeed in their bottom-up expansive process, but they may also remain restricted to a more or less local area. Therefore, it is per se natural for a contact phenomenon to be restricted to just a small area of the entire contact zone.
A final remark about the discursive meaning of vuestro/a has to be made: this form is often used in Cusco to shape social identity. In this regard, Howard's (2007) analysis had already proven, though mostly in reference to the 1PL, that the strategic use of personal pronouns plays a crucial role in speakers' creation of a local identity.
Entre las estrategias discursivas que le sirven al hablante para posicionarse dentro del campo social, notamos el uso contextual de los pronombres personales de primera y tercera persona (nosotros versus ellos). El nosotros se vuelve sumamente ambivalente en algunos contextos: su uso estratégico sirve tanto para trazar como para borrar las fronteras socioculturales. (Howard 2007: 377) 'Among the discourse strategies used by speakers to position themselves in the social context, we notice the contextual use of first and third person pronouns (we vs. they). We becomes extremely ambivalent in some contexts: its strategic use allows speakers as much to draw as to erase sociocultural borders' In a similar vein, Soto Rodríguez & Fernández Mallat (2012), while elaborating on their analysis of possessives (summarized here in the citation above), point out the importance of establishing social relations in the discourse of Andean speakers.
In what follows, we will relate this to the singularity of Cusqueño social identity.

Cusqueño (language) identity and the pride in being mestizo
As the former capital of the Inca Empire and present-day touristic capital of Peru, Cusco has been constructing its own particular identity for centuries. Historically, this city has developed an actual mixed Hispano-Indigenous heritage (mestizo) identity since earlier colonial times, where the syncretism between Indigenous and European cultures is recognizable throughout different cultural manifestations. This mixture was always perceived and handled proudly by the local elites, amongst whom Spanish/Quechua bilingualism was quite common during the colonial era and far beyond. Spanish settlers and their descendants who turned into landlords around the city of Cusco often used Quechua and even claimed to be related to the Inca nobles (Mannheim 1991: 71-74). In this particular case, the rigidly stratified society during the colonial times resulted from an adaptation to Inca society, alongside the implementation of the archetypical colonial infrastructure. The pride amongst the ruling classes in thinking of themselves as mestizos, as opposed to other Spanish Creoles and most especially to the Indigenous people, who became stigmatized as illiterates, provincianos or campesinos 'peasants' (Brandt 2016;Delforge 2012), has remained to a great extent intact to this day.
In the last decades, tourism has entered this traditional scenario, altering it partially but also intensifying some previously existing tendencies. Cusqueño identity is currently fueled by a symbiotic relationship between ethnic tourism and nativist ideology (incanismo), where the latter authenticates the former as a product, while tourism itself (as a response to the international attention gained by Cusco in our global era) intensifies such an ideology (van den Berghe & Flores Ochoa 2000: 23; see also Silverman 2002), and thereby strengthens local pride (see below). Nevertheless, it has to be noted that tourism is not solely responsible for the success of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish, as any amateur might claim if he/she thought, for instance, that the inhabitants of Cusco were trying to adapt their speech to those varieties spoken by the Spaniards that can occasionally be seen (and heard) on the streets of Cusco (mostly on their way to Machu Picchu). Among the languages of occasional migrants, European Spanish, that is, the only variety constantly using vuestro/a, is far less common than American Spanish (and, of course, less common than English and some other major languages).21 However, tourism has definitely shaped the current linguistic identities of Cusco, since the city had to determine how to present itself to today's global world.
The local pride already mentioned results both in the cultivation of Cusqueño Quechua, which is usually considered to be Standard Quechua, and in a general tendency to use language as a means to stress the city's idiosyncrasy (most notoriously, as opposed to Lima). Niño-Murcia (1997: 156), whose research is focused on the linguistic purism in Cusco (especially, but not only, as regards Quechua), insists on the very same idea: In accordance with the regional attempt to define the characteristic features of its culture and in order to distance and enhance Cuzco's identity with respect to Lima, language is being used to stress its regional uniqueness within the country and also to create a social hierarchy within the city.
Such uniqueness is built to create a social hierarchy, distinguishing the urban elite from the rural groups of Quechua/Spanish bilinguals. Even though the situation is far more complex, we could state that, to a certain degree, the current opposition between (Spanish) monolingual speakers from the city and (Spanish/ Quechua) bilingual speakers from the rural areas parallels the opposition some authors have postulated for the colonial era between (Spanish/ Quechua) bilin-21 The latest statistics of the Dirección General de Comercio Exterior y Turismo (Dircetur) of the Cusco regional government show that just 2.1% of all tourists are from Spain, whereas the percentage of tourists from Spanish-speaking American countries is 11% and national tourists account for 38% (numbers taken from the Boletín Estadístico de Turismo 2014 of the Dircetur: 8, 11). gual speakers (i.e. the ruling mestizos) and the (Quechua) monolingual speakers (i.e. the Indigenous populations in and around Cusco).
In a study about the "recession" of unstressed vowel devoicing in Cusco Spanish, Delforge (2012: 331) introduces a new element in the formation of Cusqueños' self-consciousness and linguistic pride: getting rid of the cultural stereotypes of the Andean region (as seen from Lima and other parts of Peru): It has been suggested that Cusqueñans' tendency to view devoicing as typical of rural migrants has an attitudinal basis, reflecting their desire to escape the provincial perception of the region that has long existed in other parts of Peru and elsewhere.
Consequently, speakers negotiate their cultural and ethnic identity during their linguistic interactions (Howard 2007: 377), which means that their belonging to a given social group must also be conveyed by linguistic strategies. Amongst these, Howard (2007) -citing De la Cadena (2000: 30-33) -points out, again, the use of nosotros: Al observar los casos recurrentes de ambivalencia en torno al pronombre nosotros en los textos, me pregunto si se trata de un rasgo diagnóstico del discurso de un cierto tipo de actor social. Dicho de otro modo ¿podría afirmarse que la ambivalencia en el uso de este pronombre construye un campo discursivo socialmente definido? De hecho, el nosotros ambivalente suele tener el efecto de posicionar a los entrevistados a alguna distancia de una identidad indígena, por no decir que construye una identidad amestizada. (Howard 2007: 377, our emphasis) 'When we look at the recurring cases of ambivalence as regards the pronoun we in the texts, I wonder myself if this is a feature that signals a certain kind of social actor. In other words, would it be possible to state that the ambivalence of the usage of this pronoun builds a discursive field that is socially defined? As a matter of fact, ambivalent we usually has the effect for the interviewed speakers of positioning themselves at a certain distance from an Indigenous identity, if not creating a mestizo identity. ' We can now highlight the strategic use of vuestro/a, not just as a particular element in this setting that contributes to Cusqueño language identity, but as a prominent discourse strategy that is used in these negotiations. In a significant number of cases, the contrastive meaning conveyed by vuestro/a delimits the psychosocial role of speech act participants. We cannot decide, however, whether the creation of the contrastive use of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish meets the culturally determined need of opposing the social role of speakers and hearers or if it is primarily devoted to the more general purpose of setting the conversational role of speakers and hearers without clear social implications (such as when a radio commentator speaks to his/her audience).
For now, we will just say that vuestro/a's basic function is opposing (for whatever reason) the voices of speakers and hearers to each other and, in so doing, contributing to discourse structuring and progression. However, we cannot overlook the social conditioning of any discourse, which, most especially in Cusco, seems to serve a very specific set of interests and specifically social stratification. This aspect would solve, partially at least, the problem of the small geographical area of vuestro/a, even though we find many other cultural and linguistic features widespread all over the Spanish/Southern Quechua contact area.
In this regard, we would like to mention another linguistic feature (also related to the study of forms of address), whose use seems to have been widespread in this (transnational) contact area, being especially intense in the Cusco region. Readers familiar with the literature about forms of address in the Southern Andes may recall some studies by Granda (2004Granda ( , 2005 about the usage of su merced in the same area. Interestingly, one of the main contributions of Granda's work is to describe how speakers of the upper social classes used to address each other with su merced. Putting aside other interesting uses of su merced that readers will surely be more familiar with, this form of address often carried a social identifying function as well. In the city of Cusco, this use seems to have been very common at least until the mid-20th century. Making use of it was an acto de identidad lingüística 'act of linguistic identity', with which speakers showed "su integración en dicha red social, constituida exclusivamente por las familias pertenecientes al estamento aristocrático cusqueño" 'their belonging to this social network, which consisted exclusively of families from Cusco's aristocracy' (Granda 2004: 252). Therefore, it seems plausible that these speakers were willing to assert their belonging to the upper classes both in-group (by using address forms like su merced) and out-group (by using address forms like vuestro/a, even though we do not preclude the possibility of this form being used in-group as well).
If we could confirm that the use of vuestro/a prevails amongst speakers of the upper classes (more precisely, again, amongst speakers willing to assert their belonging to the upper classes), we should then recall that, in Cusco, upper class relates to a mestizo identity and clarify that using vuestro/a is not meant to express disdain for the addressee nor to highlight any relation of power (in the sense of Brown & Gilman 1960). Quite the contrary, its use can protect the hearer's face; what really matters is that speakers, when using vuestro/a, bring to the fore their social background and position themselves as highly educated speakers and, more precisely, educated mestizos. In this regard, the use of vuestro/a in Cusco can also function as an "act of linguistic identity", but a type of act that does not necessarily rule out the hearers and may even serve as an invitation to the speaker's world, as our example (6) has already illustrated.
Elucidating the idiosyncratic sociological complexity of Cusqueños and their mestizo identity, which implies a particular adaptation and readjustment of an Indigenous culture, turns out to be a better way to understand why language contact (even at a notional level, see Section 4.1) is still a suitable explanation.
Otherwise, we could not account for a contact-induced change that, unlike the vast majority of changes resulting from the contact between Spanish and Indigenous languages in Hispanic America, started as a change from above.

Conclusion
In this chapter, we have analyzed the usage of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish, which has never been studied in any depth, despite the fact that it is quite common in the region. Vuestro/a is always plural and takes part in the grammatical paradigm of ustedes (there is no vosotros or clitic os and no verbal endings of the etymological 2PL). We have distinguished two large groups of uses: formulaic and contrastive or strategic -the latter being especially striking, even though the former still deserve an analysis in much more depth.
Originating from our description of both uses of vuestro/a, we devoted the rest of the chapter to explaining how they arose in Cusco Spanish. First, we presented a heterogeneous group of problems that our research had to face: the existence of a semantic category of clusivity also in the 2PL, the survival of vuestro/a in other parts of Hispanic America, its use for referential disambiguation, and the fact that 2PL pronouns are generally understudied in Hispanic Linguistics. However, none of these problems preclude us from considering vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish a special phenomenon in its own right, as it actually is.
Second, we formulated three complementary hypotheses about its possible origins: (1) its parallelism to SG vuestro/a (as for its resistance to the overgeneralization of other personal pronouns) or even extension from SG to PL; (2) its idiomaticization from dispositive documents; and (3) the revitalization of vosotros in 19th century American Spanish. As these hypotheses did not account for the fact that vuestro/a is limited to Cusco Spanish, we claimed that language contact (specifically a notional transfer from Southern Quechua to Spanish) and the idiosyncrasy of Cusqueño society in the shaping of its specific identity provide the missing complementary explanation. Speakers with Quechua-L1, who were used to defining and constantly updating the relation between speakers and hearers during their verbal interactions and, for this purpose, relied on the clusivity distinction in 1PL pronouns, needed a way to keep on doing that when speaking Spanish. This language lacks, as is well known, such a clusivity distinction but does have (even more clearly so during the colonial era) an especially complex system of pronouns of address.
As regards the possessives, there were only two options: su and vuestro/athe latter being more restricted in the diasystem (in a few discourse traditions, according to Hypothesis 2, and/or in foreign European varieties, according to Hypothesis 3). Speakers naturally adapted the variant that was felt to be more special (or salient) for the new special (or creative) use, which still shared some semantic characteristics with the canonical Spanish form. Of course, the creative use triggered by language contact also leads to convergence with Spanish, not only in form but also in meaning: for example, in the most plausible colonial source, that is, the so-called dispositive documents (cf. Hypothesis 2), vuestro/a was used from superior to inferior positions, which might still be recognizable, after some restructuring, in the use by speakers from the upper classes when they try to assert their belonging to the group of educated Cusqueños. Finally, we consider vuestro/a to be part of the broader discursive strategy of using personal reference markers as a means of sociocultural demarcation by speakers constantly positioning themselves as part of a (seemingly contradictory) social class of mestizos.
This kind of self-awareness on the basis of social criteria might prompt us to consider that the use of vuestro/a depends on sociolinguistic factors (literacy) or even geolinguistic factors (dichotomy "urban/rural"). This is partially true, particularly if we assume that the role of speakers' own perceptions is the basis for the interaction of linguistic varieties (see Koch & Oesterreicher 2011). However, it should then be noted that educated speakers use vuestro/a only in formal contexts (if we consider the so-called Varietätenkette 'variational chain', as defined by Koch & Oesterreicher 1985, the geographic and social markedness can be readjusted as speech styles or even as communicative immediacy/distance). On the other hand, as regards its strategic use, vuestro/a serves a very specific discursive function: contrast between speech act participants. That is why, as stated at the beginning, the usage of vuestro/a is related to variationist and discursive factors.
The centuries-old but constantly updating development of a very idiosyncratic cultural and linguistic identity in Cusco might allow us to predict a longer persistence of the phenomenon analyzed here. In the last few years, it seems to be increasingly perceived as stereotypically Cusqueño by other Peruvians: it has already entered the category of place-linked linguistic expectations (e.g. Carmichael 2016), and this is a sort of local flavor that Cusqueños may be willing to maintain for much longer -as shown by example (19) from an internet forum (our emphasis): (19) La gente de cuzco usa el segundo pronombre plural: VUESTRO (A) (S) mientras que la gente de Lima usamos USTEDES. Me agrada la forma cuzquena. (sciffo, 27-ene-2008, 17:23, Lima; forosperu.net, thread: "Diferencias entre Lima y las provincias") 'People from Cusco use the second plural pronoun: VUESTRO 'your', while we, the people from Lima, use USTEDES. I kinda like the form from Cuzco' Our findings offer a rich compendium of possibilities. The availability of more historical corpora (especially from the 18th and 19th centuries) would be crucial to consolidate the diachronic paths we have laid out. Similarly, a broader database with more specific sociolinguistic information and more data from bilingual speakers is needed to be able to make a precise statement on the role of language contact. In this contribution, we have outlined sketches of a much more complex picture. Even though we consider that our analysis is on the right track, many questions remain and can only be addressed after a much larger amount of data has been gathered for every factor we have focused on. The expected rewards, however, seem to be promising and could contribute profoundly to our understanding of language variation, language contact and language change.