Intensifiers in English and German - A Comparison (Hardcover)

Intensifiers play a profoundly important role in many areas of grammar, notably reflexivity. This volume represents a study of this neglected area. It explores the syntax and semantics of intensifiers and offers a contrastive analysis of the properties of these expressions in English and German. Such little work has been done on intensifiers that not even their basic categorical status is agreed on. Previous studies have subsumed them under classes as heterogeneous as personal pronouns, reflexives and adverbs, with all of these labels highlighting relevant aspects of their distribution and semantic contribution. By contrast, the position taken in this study is that intensifiers belong to the class of focus particles. Due to its contrastive approach, the book will be of interest to linguists of various persuasions. Theoreticians should find challenging material highly relevant to late-1990s syntactic and semantic controversies, while specialists of English and German, as well as linguists working in language typology, can expect analyses to complement their understanding of language.