@inproceedings{01JGKKWVSK72RR8D2G11E4GQ3R,
  abstract     = {{The study presented here investigates the speech variety of the bilingual community of Miami, which features a high degree of English-Spanish bilingualism. Multilingual communities are known to display a wide variety of contact-induced phenomena (Heine & Kuteva, 2005), such as convergence or codeswitching. Within the speech community of Miami, the current study specifically explores intensification, a site of analytic-synthetic conflict between English and Spanish grammars. English predominantly uses lexical-analytic strategies (e.g. ‘very beautiful’, ‘a big house’) for intensification (Quirk et al., 2007), whereas Spanish employs more morphological-synthetic (e.g. guapísimo, un casón) markers (Pena, 1999; Lázaro Mora, 1999).

Concretely, the current study aims to investigate which preferences Miami bilinguals have in terms of the language or strategy of choice and which factors influence these preferences. An important factor in this respect is the semantic-pragmatic function of the intensifier. However, intralinguistic factors are expected not to suffice in explaining the attested intensifying patterns. Therefore, extralinguistic factors are also considered, especially those concerning the language proficiency, acquisition and attitudes of the participants with respect to the use of both English and Spanish. Additionally, in order to map contact-induced convergence effects in the speech variety of Miami, a comparison is made between the intensifying strategies used in this bilingual speech community and those used in two relevant monolingual communities, one English (the southeastern U.S.) and one Spanish (the city of Havana).

To investigate intensification within the communities under consideration, a thorough analysis of naturalistic corpus data is carried out. These data are taken from the Miami Corpus of BangorTalk (Deuchar et al., 2008), the Santa Barbara Corpus (Du Bois et al., 2005) and the Havana subcorpus of Ameresco (Albelda Marco & Estellés Arguedas, 2010). The Miami Corpus, which is investigated in its entirety, consists of approximately 265,000 words from more than 35 hours of spontaneous conversation produced by 83 Miami bilinguals recorded in 2008. From the corpora of Santa Barbara and Havana, samples are taken of approximately 23,600 words each.

In total, 1,282 intensifying constructions are found in the Miami Corpus, including 902 unilingual English, 369 unilingual Spanish and 11 bilingual English-Spanish constructions. Additionally, a wide variety of both analytic and synthetic intensifiers is found. Although many more English than Spanish intensifiers are found, as well as more analytic than synthetic, the proportion of synthetic forms is much higher among the Spanish intensifiers than the English ones. It is also found that an intensifier’s semantic-pragmatic function does not correlate with the language in which it appears. Instead, the language of choice correlates much more strongly with the extralinguistic variables under consideration.

As for the comparison with the monolingual communities, it is found that Miami bilinguals use significantly more synthetic intensifiers in English compared to monolingual English speakers, while using fewer synthetic intensifiers in Spanish than monolingual Spanish speakers. The qualitative and quantitative description of intensification in the speech variety of Miami bilinguals offered in this study sheds light on the construction of bilingual grammars from unilingual ones in an increasingly multilingual world.}},
  author       = {{Claassen, Simon A.}},
  booktitle    = {{LinGhentian Doctorials, 8th, Book of Abstracts}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  location     = {{Ghent, Belgium}},
  pages        = {{24--25}},
  title        = {{Intensification strategies in the English-Spanish speech of Miami bilinguals}},
  url          = {{https://www.linghentiandoctorials.ugent.be/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/BOOK-OF-ABSTRACTS_2024.pdf}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}