Como nasce um intensificador

In this paper we present some hypothesis on the birth of degree expressions such as pra caramba 'to caramba' (and the like), and à beça 'to beça' (and the like). In a previous paper on the syntactic and semantic properties of these expressions (SOUZA, manuscrito), we have shown that some of them, still very concrete, have a restriction on its application to some classes of predicates. From the point of view of Referential Semantics, we hypothesize that are referential and compositional properties of the expressions, in parallel with lexical properties, which explain why the class (or classes) can modify syntactic and semantic domains so diverse, such as nouns (individuals), verbs (events/states) and adjectives/adverbs (degree predicates).