Tomad and tomá, etc.: Change and Continuity in a Morphological Feature

The forms and usage of the plural imperative in Golden-Age Spanish had considerable social significance to the speaker, because of their connection with the rather sensitive phenomenon of address formulae. As such, the evolution and usage distribution of the variants of these verbal inflections may best be studies through a multifaceted analysis: morpho-phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, on the one hand, and with a combination of relevant grammatical treatises and literary data, on the other. This article has used this approach to identify a number of factors that motivated or constrained the use of the imperative at that time.