Upwards Intensifiers in the English, German and Croatian Language

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...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Anita Pavić Pintarić, Zrinka Frleta
Format: Article
Language:deu
Published: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts) 2014-12-01
Series:Vestnik za Tuje Jezike
Subjects:
Online Access:https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/Vestnik/article/view/3045
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1855-8453
2350-4269