Search results for "intensificatori"

Intensifiers

2014

The label ‘intensifiers’ (or ‘emphatics’) groups together words, widely attested crosslinguistically (e.g. Eng. x-self, Germ. selbst, Ital. stesso, Lat. ipse, Japanese zisin and zibun, Mandarin zı j ĭetc.), whose main function is to signal some sort of emphasis or focus with respect to a nominal head they are adjoined to in the sentence, as in The author herself will present the book. In addition to the term ‘intensifiers’ (Moravcsik 1972; Edmondson and Plank 1978), there exist many other labels in the relevant literature to define this sub-class of functional words, which reflect the (anything but closed) debate on their actual categorial status. This entry discuss the origin and the funct…