Resumen de Mero no es un mero adjetivo: Sus valores y usos en las variedades americanas
This article focuses on the analysis of the adjectival and adverbial values of mero in contemporary Spanish, with special attention to its American varieties. The data, which includes examples of formal and spontaneous written texts, shows that the adverbial adjective mero has two main values, one as an intensional adjective and other as a focusing adverb for expressing exclusivity. Although only found in some Spanish varieties, mero can also function as a focusing identifier. The corpus findings confirm previous accounts of mero as an adjective, adverb and argumentative operator; on the other hand, the linguistic evidence points out semantic and syntactic properties not reported before, such as nominalization (los meros del lugar), the admittance of quantifiers (al más mero estilo) or definite article (las meras mujeres), and its value as an adverb in postposition (irse mero allí enfrente). Thus, a more complete inventory of its semantic values, uses and grammatical properties is provided.
