The European roots of the present-day Americanism su merced García Godoy, María Teresa Calderón Campos, Ambrosio Miguel History of the Spanish language Historical Morphosyntax T-V distinction The allocutive su merced ‘His Grace, His Worship’ is currently regarded as a syntactic Americanism. In certain Hispanic American geolects, su merced is currently used for second person singular (2P su merced) deixis and may denote respect (V address) as well as intimacy (T address). The traditional hypothesis argues that these uses are only found in American Spanish, and that the alloc-utive su merced dates back to the Afro-Hispanic varieties of the colonial period. This chapter establishes, for the first time, the evolutionary connections of the current Americanism with the history of su merced usage in Spain. It also explores a new, non-literary database and argues for a new diachronic hypothesis on (2P) su merced, from a Pan-Hispanic perspective. 2024-04-08T07:32:49Z 2024-04-08T07:32:49Z 2020 book part García-Godoy, María Teresa / Miguel Calderón Campos (2022): "The European roots of the present-day su merced", en Martin Hummel and Célia dos Santos Lopes Address in Portuguese and Spanish. Studies in Diacronic Reconstruction. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, páginas, 413-443 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/90460 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701234-013 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional De Gruyter