Intensifiers in English and German : A Comparison

ISBN-13: 9780415217132 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 296 str.

Peter Siemund

Opis

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.

Recenzje

'...a stimulating read...full of carefully contextualized examples...I would recommend it not only to semanticists interested in focus particles and discourse structure, but also - strongly - to syntacticians, who will find here a goldmine of fascinating semantic and distributional material to feed their own reflection on clause structure.' - Anne Zribi-Hertz , ELL 2001

Spis treści

1. Introduction 1.1 Background 1.2 Three uses of intensifiers 1.3 Outline and objectives 2. The Syntax of Intensifiers - Overview 2.1 The three uses of intensifiers 2.2 Intensifiers as focus particles 2.3 Related expressions 2.4 Previous analyses 2.5 Historical development 3. Adnominal Intensifiers 3.1 Adnominal SELF - overt heads 3.1.1 ANS - the NP-Adjunct 3.1.2 Syntactic restrictions 3.2 Adnominal SELF - covert heads 3.3 ANS in role reversal structures 4. Adverbal intensifiers 4.1 AVS - The VP-Adjunct 4.2 AVS as an adverb 4.3 Syntactic restrictions 4.3.1 Passivisation and passives 4.3.2 Topicalisation 4.3.3 Scope bearing elements 4.3.4 Inclusive versus exclusive AVS 5. The Meaning of Intensifiers - Overview 5.1 Three approaches to intensifiers 5.2 The three uses of intensifiers 6. Adnominal Intensifiers 6.1 Scalar and non-scalar approaches 6.2 Possible instantiations of centre and periphery 6.3 Unique identifiability 6.4 ANS in role reversal structures 7. Adverbal Inclusive Intensifiers 7.1 Adverbal inclusive versus adnominal SELF 7.2 Repeatability and transferability 7.3 Contextual conditions 7.4 Comparison: inclusive AVS versus also 7.5 Inclusive AVS as ANS plus also 7.6 Scalar analyses 7.7 Presupposition: negative proposition 7.8 Central representative theory 8. Adverbal exclusive intensifiers 8.1 Basic properties 8.2 Responsibility, benefit and suffering 8.3 Agentivity 8.4 Centrality in situation 9. Summary

O autorze

Peter Siemund