Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Online First

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).

The aim of this article is to analyze the image of Slovakia outlined in two debut novels composed by migrant women writers, such as Divorzio di velluto (2022) by Jana Karšaiova and Dal diario di una piccola comunista (2020) by Michaela Šebőková. My intention is to answer the question whether, and to what extent, women writers of Slovak origin, who have lived similar existential experiences, have constructed a homogeneous vision of their homeland. The analysis allows to capture a fragment of the history of Slovakia in the era of communism at the end of the twentieth century in a broad social and cultural context.