Correspondências paulistas

The present study uses a philological perspective to analyse a group of handwritten letters drafted during the decade of 1765-1775, in the São Paulo captaincy. From this initial work, the texts are transcribed for one try to define some of their syncronic and dyacronic coordenates, situational and linguistics. Thus, one can do a detailed philological study of material and formal aspects of a mostly homogenous corpus of one type of document (letters) but which shows variations. At the end of this philological work, the semidiplomatic edition of 137 folios is published, along with document facsimiles. Because of its conservative character, the edition is of interest to linguists, and because of the topics covered in the letters, it is a rich source for historians. From the attentive observation of the published sources, it has been possible to raise a possible relation between sociohistorical factors of senders and receivers and about the adress forms used on the texts. To make clear the relationship between social factors and linguistic elements, it has been done a social-historical description of the documents, culminating with research on the senders\' origin, and allowing the researcher to outline a basic social profile of half the authors. At least 32 documents were written, or dictated, by men born in the Colony, mainly in the Sao Paulo captaincy. Based on this information, of the social-historical description of the period and of Marquilha\'s study (2000), we propose a socialprofessional classification that takes the corpus into account. Forms of address (FAs) in Portuguese have been the object of various synchronic and diachronic studies. Some seek to explain how the pronoun você (from vossa mercê) was included in the Brazilian FA system; some focus on analysis of nouns and pronouns, describing and comparing their use in public and private documents at specified time periods.