Age-based variation and patterns of recent language change: A case-study of morphological and lexical intensifiers in Spanish

Abstract

This study aims to gain further insight into processes of recent language change, both at the level of the speech community and the individual one (i.e. in terms of age grading), by combining the Real-Time Construct and the Apparent-Time Construct. It focuses on intensifiers, which are of a particular interest due to their versatility and rapid change. The data are collected in a corpus of Madrilenian present-day Spanish (CORMA), and provide an overview of synthetic intensifying constructions, including suffixation (e.g. golazo ‘nice goal’) and prefixation (e.g. superguay ‘very cool’) of the base, and several analytic constructions, that is lexical intensifiers that modify a base word (e.g. mazo de humilde ‘really humble’). In concrete, the productive paradigm of intensifying strategies is empirically monitored across different generations. This analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the distribution and motives behind age-based preference, and unveils whether the Apparent-Time Construct is able to equally detect recent language change for different linguistic features.