Multiword Disjunctive Adverbs of Style in Portuguese

This paper examines the syntactic properties of Portuguese multiword adverbs, focusing specifically on disjunctive adverbs of style (PS). Also known as enunciative, metalinguistic, or illocutionary adverbs, PS adverbs function as sentence-external modifiers, typically expressing the speaker’s attitude on a given statement. Our research has cataloged approximately 3,700 multiword adverbs in Brazilian and European Portuguese, among which 90 have been identified as disjunctive adverbs of style. This study aims not only to define the formal properties and semantic nuances of this adverbial category, but also to provide a comprehensive analysis of its diverse roles in discourse. To achieve this, we examine their occurrences in the Roda Viva corpus (Miranda et al., 2024), which consists of transcripts from 711 interviews in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese.