Forms of treatment in Instant Messaging: address mechanisms in written conversations of two Spanish varieties

Abstract

Our research focuses on the written conversations produced in mobile phone instant messaging applications. The corpus is constituted by two interactions of WhatsApp produced by speakers of peninsular Spanish and Spanish of Argentina, collected between 2014 and 2016 through the observer participant technique and housed in the CoDiCE database. The objective is to analyse the forms of address (in particular, those with a deictic value) that function as organizers of the written conversation in two varieties of Spanish. In this sense, not only intralinguistic variation is compared, but also the relationship between written and face-toface conversation, from the intersection of different phenomena such as the delimitation of adjacency pairs, coherence mechanisms and cohesion, the management of time and the linearity of the communicative exchanges.