Search results for "intensifiers"
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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…
Intensificatori e soggettificazione in latino: sulla grammaticalizzazione di maxime
2022
The aim of this paper is to investigate the grammaticalization path of the intensifying adverb maxime in Early Latin, within the perspective of the so-called ‘subjectification’ theory. Despite the difficulty of drawing discrete boundaries within the multifunctional category of adverbs, the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic analysis of maxime across different contexts of use allows us to identify at least three main functions of this adverb in early Latin texts, mostly in the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence. In particular, adopting the perspective of the Functional Discourse Grammar, it is shown that maxime is used as (i) degree adverb, which modifies a large range of elements acting at …