Macrosyntactic Analysis of ‘Cojonudo’, ‘Estupendo’, ‘Guay’, ‘Genial’, and ‘Perfecto’ as Statements

Abstract

In this research work we intend to carry out a detailed synchronous characterization of the functions of cojonudo, estupendo, guay, genial and perfecto in the Spanish of Spain. We start from the hypothesis that these qualifying adjectives have various functions inside and outside the sentence framework that have not yet been treated in the specialized bibliography. To undertake our analysis, we observe its behavior in different corpora that contain real discourse (the MEsA Corpus, the Val.Es.Co. 2.0. Corpus, and the COLA(M) Corpus), as well as in other corpora where we find some texts in which there is a mimesis of the oral, such as the synchronous academic corpus: CORPES XXI and CREA. Our study follows a qualitative methodology, which seeks to offer a comprehensive analysis of these units. The results show that the discursive uses of these expressions are diverse and that, in reactive interventions, these forms present a similar discursive behavior, since they occupy the same functional space as a Spanish acceptance modal operator (like vale or de acuerdo). The theoretical framework used to describe the polyfunctionality of these expressions is the Macrosyntax of Fuentes Rodríguez (2013, 2017, 2019).