Intensifiers in the Indo-European Languages

Student: Akutina Natalia

Educational Programme: Linguistic Theory and Language Description (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2018

This paper focuses on intensifiers in the Indo-European languages. Intensification has been a very popular topic since the publication of Bolinger’s book Degree Words. The classification provided by Bolinger for English has been lately elaborated and applied to other languages. However, until now, the majority of research is restricted to separate languages or to separate intensifiers. Within the current research I am going to analyze systems of intensifiers in 12 different Indo-European languages and compare them on branch and group level. Firstly, I will briefly review some prominent theories related to the study. Secondly, I will describe the results of my previous research conducted on high degree modifiers, which are relevant in understanding the nature of the category. Finally, I will describe the revealed sets of items that languages use to scale a quality.

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