Ni tan mal: un «operador argumentativo» en el español del siglo xxi

: The present research focuses on the construction ni tan malin 21st century European Spanish and describes it as an argumentative operator. This operator reverses the orientation of the argumentation and, given the circumstances, presents the conclusion as the best possible option. In this argumentative movement, the so-called «complemento de proporción» (for-complement) (Para el precio, el hotel no está ni tan mal ‘for the price, the hotel isn’t so bad’) plays a crucial role. In addition to the grammatical and discursive characterization of ni tan mal, the study supports its emerging transformation into a conversational marker and relates it to other modal affirmation and negation operators described in recent studies. Data are drawn from corpus representative of the written colloquial register and are analyzed