ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the expression of emotions in teenage language in Madrid and, more specifically, about whether or not emotion can be conveyed through the use of the vocatives “tío/a” in terms of suprasegmentational and prosodic features, that is the intonation and the pauses made while uttering them when used by teenagers talking to their peers in the COLAm-corpus. As Rodríguez Salazar (2008: 152) points out, “The emotions are inherently indicators of relevance or indifference, the degree of interiorization, the commitment or rejection of the cultural contents that are assimilated by groups or individuals within a community” (my translation). The working hypothesis here is that if there is a prosodic difference in the uttering of these discourse markers, consistent with the different emotions expressed, then this kind of analysis is possible.
