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.