2025/08/20 by Linde Roels
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Gender Studies in Language #Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition #Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
paper · doi:10.1075/rro.23002.roe
crossref issued 2025/08/20 · crossref published 2025/08/20 · crossref published-online 2025/08/20 · openalex publication_date 2025/08/20 · crossref created 2025/08/20 · openalex created_date 2025/08/21 · crossref published-print 2025/12/31 · crossref deposited 2026/02/02 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract This article aims to trace the grammaticalization and recent social diffusion of the intensifier mazo (de) . Despite its high frequency in the language of Madrilenian teenagers, this linguistic innovation of the late 20th century has not been studied in detail to date. To this end, a real-time analysis is carried out, based on two highly comparable samples of youth speech data, recorded at two different moments in the 21st century: Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid or COLAm (2003–2007) and youth conversations from the Corpus Oral de Madrid or CORMA (2019). The results highlight that mazo (de) passed through a process of grammaticalization from collective noun to multifunctional intensifier, including reanalysis and host class expansion ( Traugott, 2008 ), and bring to light innovative pragmatic uses. The sociolinguistic analysis suggests that the social diffusion of mazo (de) can be understood as a “change from below” ( Eckert, 2003 ).