2025/05/19 by Virginia Acuña Ferreira · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Gender, Health, and Social Inequality #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
paper · doi:10.1075/prag.24053.acu
openalex publication_date 2025/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract In recent years, the vocative tío/a has attracted specific attention because of its frequency and salient pragmatic functions in everyday conversation in European Spanish. This paper presents a conversation-analytical approach to the feminine variant, tía , in extracts from a single conversation of almost twenty minutes among young women friends, who focus on the telling of stories of a personal nature and employ this form as a vocative around thirty times. The analysis demonstrates that the vocative tía has a central role in managing and negotiating affiliation in the focused interaction, highlighting: (a) uses to mitigate disaffiliation in the mid-telling and to friendly manage oppositional stances; (b) uses as a strategy to prepare the ground for affiliation in the narrative climax; (c) uses to mobilize affiliation after emotive assessments and to accentuate reciprocity by the recipient’s matching use; and (d) uses to pursue affiliation in expansions of storytelling.