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“Tía, me dolió, ¿sabes?”

Negotiating affiliation through the vocative tía in Spanish conversational storytelling

ORCiD logo with link | Universidade de Vigo
Published online: 19 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24053.acu
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and literature review
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Data analysis
    • 3.1Displaying disaffiliation in the mid-telling
    • 3.2Preparing the ground for affiliation in the narrative climax
    • 3.3Constructing “emotional reciprocity”: Matching uses of tía
    • 3.4Pursuing affiliation and expanding the storytelling
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (54)
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