Intensification in the Spanish Spoken in Granada (Spain): A Corpus-Based Study

In this paper, a sociopragmatic study of intensification in the Spanish of Granada (Spain) was conducted. As a pragmatic strategy, intensification can serve rhetorical and/or social purposes in speech. On the one hand, it aligns with speakers’ communication objectives by enhancing the propositional content and/or the illocutionary force of their speech acts; on the other hand, it can function as a (im)politeness strategy. Previous studies on intensification have predominantly employed qualitative analysis. Consequently, existing knowledge about this phenomenon in Spanish would benefit from more quantitative research. This study is based on oral data extracted from the PRESEEA-GRAN corpus of vernacular speakers. By taking the speech act as the unit of analysis for the discourse segmentation, this research: (a) provides quantitative data on the density of intensifiers in the corpus; (b) determines the impact of social variables on the usage of this pragmatic strategy; and (c) qualitatively analyzes the use of intensification in the sample. The results indicate that intensification is a widespread strategy in discourse, with low variability in relation to social or stylistic conditioning, except from gender, which was found to be an explanatory variable for its usage: women in the sample displayed significantly more intensifiers than men.