Replication Data for: Intensification strategies in English-Spanish bilingual speech: Examining lexical and morphological markers in Miami bilinguals’ discourse

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Dataset abstract

This dataset contains the three data files that the related publication is based on. In total, they contain 3000+ tokens of intensifying constructions. These constructions were extracted from the Miami Corpus, the Santa Barbara Corpus (specifically a subsample of the corpus containing all conversations involving non-Hispanic speakers from southern U.S. states) and the Havana subcorpus of Ameresco. They are coded for extralinguistic variables relating to the speaker and hearer and intralinguistic variables relating to the linguistic properties of both the base and the intensifier of the intensifying construction.

Article abstract

This paper investigates the speech variety of the English-Spanish community of Miami, which features a high degree of English-Spanish bilingualism. Specifically, it 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, whereas Spanish employs more morphological-synthetic markers (e.g. guapísimo ‘very beautiful’, un casón ‘a big house’). Concretely, the current study aims to investigate whether Miami bilinguals have preferences in terms of the language or strategy of choice to express intensification and whether these preferences are influenced by intralinguistic (e.g. semantic-pragmatic function of the intensifier) or extralinguistic factors (e.g. speakers’ proficiency in, acquisition of and attitudes toward both languages). To this end, an empirical study is conducted on three corpora, one bilingual and two monolingual ones. In this study, a wide variety of both analytic and synthetic intensifiers is found. The qualitative and quantitative findings reveal that Miami bilinguals use more English than Spanish intensifiers and favor analytic intensifiers over synthetic ones. However, among the Spanish intensifiers, the proportion of synthetic forms is significantly higher than among the English intensifiers.

The data in this dataset were retrieved from the following corpora:

• Albelda Marco, M., & Estellés Arguedas, M. (2016). Corpus Ameresco. Valencia: University of Valencia.
• Deuchar, M., Carter, D., Davies, P. G., Donnelly, K., Herring, J. R., Parafita Couto, M. C., Stammers, J., Aveledo González, F., Fusser, M., Jones, L., Lloyd-Williams, S., Prys, M., & Robert, E. (2014). Miami Corpus. Bangor: ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory & Practice.
• Du Bois, J. W., Chafe, W. L., Meyer, C., Thompson, S. A., Englebretson, R., & Martey, N. (2005). Santa Barbara Corpus. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.

The extracted text fragments that are contained in the data files (Corpus_Havana.csv, Corpus_Miami.csv and Corpus_SantaBarbara_sample.csv) of this dataset only represent non-substantial portions of the sources listed above, and they do not represent coherent larger texts. Therefore, the reuse (including redistribution) of these excerpts is permitted by the exceptions rules in IPR and database protection regulations, such as Fair use (USA cf. US Copyright Act), Fair dealing (UK; cf. Exceptions to copyright), the EU Database Directive (cf. article 8 Rights and obligations of lawful users), "lover, forskrifter, rettsavgjørelser og andre vedtak av offentlig myndighet" (Norway; cf. § 14 in Åndsverkloven), "uvesentlige deler av databaser" (Norway; cf. § 24 in Åndsverkloven), "sitatretten" (Norway; cf. § 29 in Åndsverkloven). As these excerpts do not represent substantial parts of the reused sources, the redistribution of these excerpts is according to Creative Commons (CC) also permitted if they are extracted from sources that are distributed under Creative Commons licenses (cf. question "Do I always have to comply with the license terms? If not, what are the exceptions?" in the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions).