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Adjective Intensifiers in German

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2020

James M. Stratton
James M. Stratton*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
*
Department of German and Russian, School of Languages and Cultures, Purdue University, 640 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN, 47906 USA [jstratt@purdue.edu]
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Abstract

While the study of English intensifiers has been a topic of much empirical discussion (Bolinger 1972, Paradis 1997, Ito & Tagliamonte 2003, Xiao & Tao 2007, Fuchs 2017), intensification in the German language is underexplored. The present study operationalizes variationist methods to comprehensively examine the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German by investigating how adjective intensifiers rank empirically in terms of frequency and whether their use is sensitive to the social factors gender and age. Results indicate that in German, amplifiers are more frequent than downtoners, boosters are more frequent than maximizers, and the gender and the age of the speaker are factors that influence their use. These findings corroborate crosslinguistic findings (Peters 1994, Broekhuis 2013, D’Arcy 2015, Fuchs 2017). Broadly speaking, the present study suggests that the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German is, in many ways, similar to what has been observed previously in other Germanic languages.*

Keywords

German intensifiersGermanic languagesvariationist sociolinguisticsPrinciple of Accountability
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 183 - 215
Copyright
© Society for Germanic Linguistics 2020

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Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank a number of people for their comments and input. First, he would like to thank Robert Fuchs, Jochen Matthies, and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the paper. Second, he would like to thank the audience of GLAC 25 (Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference) for their interest and discussions. Conversations with Andreas Jäger about recent developments in the German intensifier system were particularly profitable. Finally, the author would like to thank two native informants for the examples provided on Norwegian (Joakim Andreassen Vea) and Icelandic (Jón Markússon).

References

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