El siglo xx como diacronía: intuición y comprobación en el caso de o sea.

Diachronic research has often made use of metalinguistic remarks made by "prestigious" speakers as a way to reconstruct past stages of a given language. The question arises as to what point these remarks can be considered objective. This issue is addressed here by paying attention to the time span between 1940 and 1960 and to Emilio Lorenzo's remarks about the evolution of Sp. o sea. Lorenzo's intuitions can be (dis)confirmed by checking them against the rae CORDE corpus. Building on the conclusions extracted from o sea, the last part of this paper establishes some methodological remarks regarding the diachronic study of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]