En plan used as a hedge in Spanish teenage language

This paper discusses the use of the Spanish expression en plan as a pragmatic marker, more specifically as a hedge in Madrid boys’ and girls’ spontaneous conversation, when used as a politeness device to save both the speaker’s and the hearer’s face. This function is the most frequent one in the material studied in this paper, which emerges from Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) The differences between boys and girls uses are also analysed, as well as the distribution among social classes.