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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]

The starting point of our investigation is the hypothesis that the non-standard Patagonian variety is made up not only of phonological, grammatical and lexical features, but also of oral interaction patterns which are essentially different from those used in urban societies. Therefore the purpose of this paper is to investigate everyday conversations from a socio-pragmatic approach, in order to give account of the relationship between this form of verbal exchange and the socio-cultural context where its production occurs. Our analysis is based on data collected during a field research carried on in two Mapuche-Tehuelche communities of the province of Chubut, in the Argentine Patagonia: Blancuntre and Cerro Centinela. Recorded spontaneous dialogues and personal interviews form the Corpus of analysis. The study focuses on the following structural constituents of conversation: pauses, silences and redundancy, within the frame of a theoretical pattern that allows us to identify a group of socio-demographic variables, which constraints the interacting behavior of the members of the investigated communities. The analysis of the collected corpus shows the relationship between conversational structures and strategies; and the Amerindian culture, where the interaction develops. The conclusion is that cultural diversity clearly emerges from the pragmatic level of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]