La evolución reciente del intensificador <i>mazo (de)</i> en el lenguaje juvenil madrileño

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 ).