¡Pucha! qué lata / ¡Chuta! no sabía: a description of the form, function, and distribution of two expressives in Chilean Spanish

Abstract

The present work describes the form, function, and distribution of pucha and chuta, two expressives used in Chilean Spanish. The research was made using a mixed methodology. On the one hand, a corpus-based study composed of Chilean web pages caught the contexts in which these words appear and their possible functions. On the other hand, interviews with native speakers elicited the use of these words, using storyboards about the delivery of good news and bad news. The interviews served to observe the phonological aspects of these expressives and their conditions of well-formedness and ill-formedness. The results showed that these forms function as interjections and expressive intensifiers, and both reflect the speaker's attitude toward the information of the sentence: pucha expresses emotive content of negative valence, while chuta expresses an epistemic state of surprise.