“Quantas vezes?” no Twitter

The present research aspires to analyze quantitatively and qualitatively the possible uses of reiterative adverbial phrases. The focus is in which of them has in their construction the word vezes, in order to describe their syntactic and semantic behaviour. The corpus used are tweets written by Brazilian speakers on the social media X. Besides that, we have another main goal: to verify the hypothesis of an emerging use of the adverbial phrase às vezes as an epistemic modulator of possibility in Brazilian Portuguese. We understand language as an alive and adaptable organism that can suffer transformations motivated by speakers' communicative needs in use situations. Therefore, we thought that it was appropriate to ground our investigation in the theoretical assumptions of the American Functional Linguistics in addition to considering other linguistic research focused on the concepts of time and verbal aspect in portuguese language. To that end, we used the postulates of Martelotta (1994); Ilari (2001); Martelotta and Areas (2003); Cunha, Costa and Cezario (2003); Cunha (2011); Ilogti de Sá (2015) e Travaglia ([1981]2016).