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Intensification in Portuguese: A Cross-dialectal Study of Muito and Bem

Abstract:Intensifiers have been the focus of a number of studies over the past decade, with considerable interest in their meaning and variability. Several scholars have discussed the use of such forms, particularly in English (Ito and Tagliamonte 2003, Tagliamonte 2008) and Spanish (Brown and Cortés-Torres 2013; Kanwit et al. 2017), exploring their structure and sociolinguistics. The objectives of the current analysis are 1) to explain the use and behavior of the canonical intensifier muito and its more colloquial counterpart bem; and 2) to understand this dichotomy in four varieties of Portuguese, namely Angolan, Brazilian, European, and Mozambican. Previous studies have shown that intensifier variation in English (e.g., very versus really) and Spanish (e.g., muy versus bien) is sensitive to a variety of language-internal and -external factors. Using a Digital Humanities-informed approach with corpus data from Corpus de referência do português contemporâneo (CRPC) and Spoken Portuguese Corpus (SPC), we show that the distribution of Portuguese muito and bem, while semantically parallel to that Spanish muy/bien, displays a wide range of dialectal nuances. This work is the first to provide a comprehensive account of the behavior of intensifiers in Portuguese, both within and across dialects.