La variación lingüística del vocativo en el lenguaje juvenil madrileño

This paper investigates the formal and functional variation of the vocative in contemporary Spanish teenage talk. For this purpose, all vocative occurrences found in conversations between teenagers in the Corpus Oral de Madrid-2016 are analyzed. The vocative is known to be highly productive in Spanish teenage talk, on both formal and functional levels. First, we provide the inventory of vocative forms used by Madrilenian teenagers, examine their origin and describe their semantic-pragmatic features, with special attention for the nominal vocative expressions used as symbols of in-group identity. The second part disentangles the pragmatic-discursive functions assumed by these forms, by taking into account the vocative’s multifunctionality. Teenagers tend to use vocatives as a phatic mechanism which allows them to control the contact with their interlocutor(s).