Strengthening uses of pure/puur in English and Dutch

In both English and Dutch, the adjective “pure/puur” has developed subjectified meanings, denoting speaker involvement rather than lexical unmixedness, as in the reinforcing “pure madness/pure waanzin”. “Pure/puur” can also express focusing discourse-structuring functions (“That’s pure luck/Da’s puur geluk”) and submodifier-of-classifier uses (“a pure economic measure/een puur economische maatregel”), structuring local discourse along precise subclassifications.This synchronic comparative study aims at describing these uses and at finetuning the analytical apparatus on which current accounts are based. Specific research questions are: what patterns do “pure/puur” engage in and what are their lexicosyntactic properties? What parameters explain distributional similarities? And how do these findings fit in with hypotheses about the unidirectionality of subjectification and the accompanying leftward movement in the NP?