The present study is a variationist proposal on the historical development of address forms in Chilean Spanish in documents from the XVI, XVII and XVIII centuries. The methodology includes an integral analysis of pragmatic, discourse and cultural factors. This is the first diachronic research on Chilean Spanish whose goal is to describe and analyze the processes involved in linguistic change through consistent empirical data. To begin with, along with the research proposal a preliminary analysis on the use of XVII century address forms and their relationship to grammatical and discourse-pragmatic variables is presented.