Spanish tope (de) + adjective: An innovative element in the superlative paradigm in current Spanish

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to account for the usages of Sp. tope (de) + adjective. Firstly, it focuses on the possible reasons why this term has come to acquire an elative value; then, its presence in current Spanish is analysed -taking into consideration its diatopical variation and its different linguistic registers - through a substantial corpus of data and from the conclusions drawn from a series of surveys conducted among peninsular Spanish speakers. Similarly, the contexts and structures where this expression may appear are also examined, to conclude that tope is an element of constructions that are in principle only reserved for morphological elatives and is undergoing an unfinished process of grammaticalization. Therefore, although it responds to grammaticalization parameters such as decategorization, fixing, or paradigmatization, there is not a complete coalescence with the adjective it modifies.