Overview

Intensifiers play a profoundly important role in many areas of grammar, notably reflexivity. This volume represents the first book-length study of this greatly 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 will find challenging material highly relevant to current syntactic and semantic controversies, while specialists of English and German, as well as linguists working in language typology, can expect new and interesting analyses to complement their current understanding of language.

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9780415217132

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Reviews

'...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

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Peter Siemund

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