Intensification in Brazilian Portuguese: muito, bem and beyond
Over the past few decades, various scholars have discussed the use of intensifiers, particularly in English (Ito & Tagliamonte 2003, Tagliamonte 2008) and Spanish (Brown Cortés-Torres 2013 and Kanwit et al. 2017), exploring their evolution and variation. Among the factors that make intensifiers a locus for linguistic innovation are their versatility, inclination for “rapid change”, and constant renewal (Tagliamonte 2012:320). The current study has two primary objectives. First, we analyze the distribution of two high-frequency intensifiers, muito ‘very’ and bem ‘well’ in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), using the Corpus Brasileiro. In the second part of the paper, we turn to an emergent class of lexical items used as intensifiers, focusing on super ‘super’ (in 2) and puta ‘whore’, using data retrieved from Corpus do Português and Twitter. The results of the quantitative analysis confirm our hypotheses suggesting that, unlike muito, these two relatively innovative intensifiers are not semantically neutral and retain vestiges of their original lexical meaning.
To date, no studies have investigated how German intensifiers are distributed within a multi-dimensional system, and no studies have empirically investigated whether their use is sensitive to social factors such as sex and age. Using a large corpus of present-day spoken German (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch ‘Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German’) the present study addresses two empirical questions. Firstly, how does the system of German adjective intensifiers currently look in terms of frequency and function? This question involves investigating the most frequently used German intensifiers, and examining whether specific types of intensifiers (i.e., Verstärker ‘amplifiers’) are more frequent than others (i.e., Begriffsminderung ‘downtoners’)? Secondly, is the use of German intensifiers sensitive to the social factors sex and age?
Variation in fictional dialogue: Three sources of variability in A Series of Unfortunate Events
Although it is typically assumed that patterns of variation in written fictional dialogue do not reflect those found in community-based studies of speech, recent work has shown that dialogue may in fact share language-internal constraints (Poplack and Malvar 2007) and language-external constraints (Blaxter 2015) with spoken data. This paper expands upon these recent works by considering both language-internal and -external constraints on morphosyntactic variation in A Series of Unfortunate Events (ASOUE). ASOUE is of particular interest because the author is inserted into the story as a character in many respects. I show that depending on the variable, variation in the dialogue may involve reflection of the author’s language-internal constraints, adherence to a prescriptive norm, or style shifting to distinguish protagonists and antagonists from one another. In effect, the choice of one morphosyntactic variant over another allows for the author to align more closely with the book’s protagonists.
The acquisition of preposition+article contractions in L3 Portuguese among different L1- speaking learners: A variationist approach
This paper sheds light on differential paths of third language (L3) acquisition of Portuguese by Spanish-English speakers whose first language is Spanish (L1 Spanish), English (L1 English), or both in the case of heritage speakers of Spanish (HL). Specifically, we look at the acquisition of a categorical rule in Portuguese, where some prepositions are invariably contracted with the determiner that follows them. Based on a corpus of 841 written assignments by Portuguese L3 learners, we extracted 10,047 tokens in obligatory contraction contexts. We analyzed the impact of linguistic (type of preposition and lexical frequency) and extra linguistic factors (course level, learner’s L1 and L2), with individual as random factor, using Rbrul (Johnson, 2008). Results point to clear tendencies, albeit abundant individual differences. L1 English and HL speakers acquire contractions at higher rate than L1 Spanish speakers, revealing a non-facilitatory role of a cognate L1 in transfer patterns during L3 acquisition.
