Flavors of intensity and emphasis: the case of muito in Brazilian Portuguese

Resumo

This paper focuses on an emphatic use of the prototypical intensifier muito in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Despite its use as an intensifier as in muito alto ‘very high’, muito has been recently used associated to emphasis as in muito golpe ‘really a coup’. The analysis proposed in this paper adopts a scalar semantics framework (cf. Kennedy (1999), Kennedy and McNally (2005), a.o.) and invests in a unified lexical entry that is adequate to capture both intensive and emphatic uses. The formal proposal is based on a semantic step that shifts the type of nouns such as golpe from <e,t> to <d,<e,t>> and provides them a scale of precision (based on Morzycki (2011)). The descriptive meaning of emphatic phrase is that the noun is interpreted in its maximum precision. On the pragmatic level, the analysis considers muito as a mixed intensifier that presents an expressive counterpart that manifests an emotional effect captured by a use-conditional based approach (cf. Gutzmann (2019)). The discussion adds facts and arguments to a body of publication on intensifiers in BP (cf. Guimarães (2007), Quadros Gomes (2011), Quadros Gomes and Sanchez-Mendes (2015), Quadros Gomes (2018), Pires de Oliveira and Souza (2018), Quadros Gomes et al. (2021)).