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This paper studies the conversational strategy known as "intensification" from a sociolinguistic perspective. The data consists of a collection of informal conversations among Spanish women from Madrid, together with a set of oral interviews with women from the same speech community. The results illustrate the social change that have developed in Madrid, as they are codified in the Spanish spoken in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is it that characterizes adolescents' small talk? Adolescent language is often accused of being sloppy, that is, not only badly articulated or vague, often with cut-off sentences, but also full of slang, taboo and swear words, and not least sprinkled with unnecessary pragmatic markers. As highlighted in the recently collected corpus, Madrid adolescents' small talk has similar characteristics, represented, for instance, by the frequent vagueness marker "y eso," the pragmatic marker "en plan," and the slang intensifier "mazo." It is also characterized by an abundant use of contact-creating expressions, both in the form of contact-checking tags such as "eh" and "no" and, in particular, vocatives such as "tía" and "tronco." But all these devices are used for a purpose. In addition to facilitating and keeping the conversation going, they are used to involve the listeners and create rapport between speaker and listener. In other words, besides the strategic discourse function, they have a strong social and bonding effect. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the use of these strategies leads to a successful outcome of small talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]