“Tía, me dolió, ¿sabes?”: Negotiating affiliation through the vocative tía in Spanish conversational storytelling

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.