Expressive intensifiers in German: syntax-semantics mismatches (original) (raw)
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Leuvense Bijdragen - Leuven Contributions in Linguistics and Philology, 2017
We can call a building ‘high’ but also ‘very high’, say that someone ‘suffers’ or ‘suffers strongly’, or exclaim that something is a ‘mess’ or a ‘pure mess’. By adding very, strongly, or pure, we as speakers indicate that a certain aspect of a property (in the case of an adjective), activity (verb), or substance (in the case of a noun) does not hold in an average way but ranks high on a scale (cf. Ghesquière & Davidse 2011). Such indications of high degree are called intensification and the lexical means used to express it are called intensifiers. In this paper, we will focus on intensification of adjectives. Intensification presupposes the possibility of gradability. Most adjectives have this semantic property (high, red, happy, etc.); nongradable or absolute adjectives, like rectangular or pregnant, miss this property, although a gradable interpretation can sometimes be coerced by adding an intensifier, for example very pregnant, as in Denver Broncos star poses for a GQ spread alo...
Intensifiers in English and German. A Comparison.
Routledge, 2000
This book deals with expressions like English myself, yourself, himself and so on, and German selbst from a perspective of language comparison. It is the first book-length study of intensifiers ever written. The study investigates the syntax and semantics of these expressions and provides a thorough account of a much neglected grammatical domain. Given that the approach is both descriptive and analytic, the book will be of interest to linguists, grammar writers and teachers of English and German alike.
The Grammar of Degree: Gradability Across Languages
Annual Review of Linguistics, 2019
In this review, we discuss the empirical landscape of degree constructions cross-linguistically as well as the major analytical avenues that have been pursued to account for individual languages and cross-linguistic variation. We first focus on comparatives and outline various compositional strategies for different types of comparative sentences as well as points of cross-linguistic variation in the lexicalization of comparative operators and gradable predicates. We then expand the discussion to superlatives, equatives, and other degree constructions. Finally, we turn to constructions beyond the prototypical degree constructions but where degree-based analyses have been pursued; we focus on change-of-state verbs and exclamatives. This is an area that is especially ripe for future cross-linguistic research. We conclude by mentioning connections to other subfields of linguistics, such as language acquisition, historical linguistics, and language processing. Expected final online publi...
Upwards Intensifiers in the English, German and Croatian Language
Journal for Foreign Languages, 2014
This paper investigates the upwards intensifiers (adverbs of intensifying) in the English, German and Croatian language. Intensity as an important human cognitive category, and language expressivity is differently treated in grammars and dictionaries of all three languages, especially with respect to different degrees of intensity. In this paper we argue that it is possible to model a typology of upwards adverb intensifiers in the three languages, according to their morphosyntactic and semantic aspects. When it comes to intensifiers, it is necessary to describe which collocates are modified by intensifiers and which semantic fields the collocates belong to. The results of the corpus analysis based on Harry Potter novels show that all the three languages express the category of the upwards intensity in the same way: the number of intensifiers is similar, the collocates mostly belong to the same semantic fields and word classes, they have similar syntactic functions.
Sportiche, D. (2017). (Im)possible intensionality. Wiener Linguistische Gazette 82, 279–288.
I will use the syntactic distribution of intensional contexts in VP to probe the structure of double object constructions and double object alternations in English and French. I conclude that such alternations are indeed underlied by double object structures, but that these are different from surface double object structures. I also conclude that French does display both underlying and surface double object structures.
Comparative Forms of Adjectives: the Semantic Classes and Syntactic Functions
Journal of language and literature, 2015
The aim of the research is to identify the real-life distribution of the comparative forms of adjectives. This paper is a corpus-based analysis which discusses comparative forms of adjectives from the linguistics perspectives. British National Corpus (BNC) is used to collect the data due to the generality of the corpora. BNC contains the collection of both spoken and written language in various text types, thus, it represents language variety as a whole. The analysis is done using semantic and syntax approach. Downing's and Locke's (2006) theory on semantic classes and Quirk's and Greenbaum's (1973) theory on syntactic functions were applied. The analysis was done in cycles, and stopped at the third cycle due to the similar findings between cycles. Ninety out of two hundred sentences containing comparative adjectives were analyzed. The analysis results in several findings. First, both semantic classes, descriptors and classifiers, appear in the analysis of comparative adjectives. Yet, the most frequent occurrence is in the semantic class of descriptors. Second, there are four syntactic functions in which comparative adjectives occur and most of them function as premodifier of a noun phrase. This paper presents the initial step for further research on comparative adjectives based on the research of semantics and syntax. Further researches on how semantic classes influence syntactic functions is encouraged.
It is well known that languages do not only differ in the features whereby they define their parts of speech (PoS) and in the number of PoS that they define, but also – and perhaps more importantly – in the levels of language structure at which they do so. As a confirmation, quite a few studies discussed the levels at which the noun can be defined across languages (Hopper & Thompson 1984, Mithun 2000, Lazard 1999). However, barring some notes in Thompson (1988) and Alfieri (2014), a similar approach to the study of the adjective class has never been proposed, although adjectives are missing more often than nouns across languages (see, e.g., Dixon 1982, Bhat 1994, Hengeveld 1992, Beck 2002; Dixon & Aikhenvald 2004, Haspelmath 2012). The aim of the talk is to fill this gap and present a typology of the levels of language analysis at which adjectival constructions can be coded across languages. Following Croft (2001: 66ff.), the “adjective” is defined as the most typical quality modifier construction in a language. A variety sample of 40 languages is, thus, gathered for the present talk and languages are classified on the level of language structure at which the most typical adjectival construction (i.e. quality modifier) is fixed. In the sample, the quality modifier construction is fixed at six main levels. Quality modifiers can be; simple stems marked by agreement in gender (Latin) or classifier (Dyirbal), and they can share most of their properties with nouns (Latin, Dyirbal) or verbs (Lavukaleve); derived stems that are formally different from a relative clause (that is, different markers code the two functions), agreeing in gender (Rig-Vedic Sanskrit) or classifiers (Yimas); derived stems that are also a relative clause (that is, a single affix code both functions, as in the relative-participles of Tibetan languages, like Garo, Genetti 1992, 2005); a clause that differs from a derived stem (i.e. a relative clause or a word-sentence marked for switch-reference, as in Tuscarora); a verb stem incorporated into a noun (Chukchi); finally, a phrasal constituent that is a quality lexeme settled in the modifier slot of the phrase without overt marking (Vietnamese), as in Hengeveld’s “flexible” strategy (see Rijkhoff & Van Lier 2013). From the analysis it emerges that the simple stem (i.e. the lexicon), the derived stem, the relative-stem, the phrase and the clause represent the focal layers of the lexico-syntax continuum defined by Croft (2001: 17), and the first sketch of a cross-linguistic theory of the levels of language structure.