“Tuya, tuya aunque no quieran”. Voz femenina e intensificación en correspondencia amorosa del español moderno

Abstract

This work explores a corpus of 18th century love letters from litigations due to breaking of marriage contract, held in the Diocesan Archive of Pamplona. The study is framed in a project focused in women discoursive universes (16th to 19th centuries) that addresses the expression of affections and emotions. Discourse tradition –private letter-, amorous topics and writers’ profiles favour a wide range of intensification strategies at different levels. Syntactic processes are examined in these pages, specially conditional and concessive clauses that could also, in other contexts, keep a referential function or even mitigate. Attention is paid to different context levels that allow the interpretation of these clauses as scalar or evaluative, both of them intensification requirements.