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Within the study of politeness phenomena, small talk is an area that has gained in interest and popularity over recent years (cf. Coupland, 2000b). Given its close connection with phatic communion (Malinowski, 1972 [1923]), it constitutes a valuable resource for maintaining friendly relations in social interaction. This paper deals with the interactional dynamics of small talk in a dialectal variety of Argentinean Spanish, namely Buenos Aires Spanish. It does so from a sociolinguistic perspective, but it also builds on sociocultural pragmatics. The aim of the study is to investigate how small talk operates in both institutional and noninstitutional settings in terms of socio-discursive and pragmatic strategies, and to identify some of the functions that it fulfills. The corpus analysed consists of a range of data collected in Bahía Blanca in the form of notes from participant observation as well as recordings of naturally occurring face-to face interactions. Also included is some consideration of how members of the community under study perceive (Placencia, 2001) and interpret (Gumperz, 1982a; Tannen, 1996) the phenomena in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]