This article focuses on an aspect of intensification which has not, so far, received due attention in the extensive literature on the topic: intensifier iteration (very very hot) and co-occurrence (very extremely hot), with a special focus on Old, Middle and Early Modern English as represented in… read more
This chapter is concerned with the origin and development of the English epistemic adverb maybe. Using various historical corpora, including the Helsinki Corpus and ARCHER as a baseline, we analyse a range of structures featuring the sequence (it) may be, paying special attention to those which may… read more
English and Romance possess a particularly interesting way of expressing evidentiality and epistemicity, namely markers involving a verb of saying, knowing, or seeming followed by a complementizer (Verb+C), as Spanish dizque, Galician seica, and English looks like. In this chapter we consider the… read more
This article contributes to the discussion on the origin of pragmatic markers by exploring the development of parenthetical structures with the two default verbs of seeming in the history of English: seem and impersonal think ‘seem, appear’. Drawing mainly on data from the Helsinki Corpus, we… read more
Propositional attitude predicates, such as English think, guess and seem, occur parenthetically in many languages. In this article we pay attention to a group of propositional attitude predicates which can be labelled epistemic/evidential, namely appear, look, seem and sound, and which, in… read more
This paper studies the intensifying use of most, comparing it to the behaviour ofright, one of the most common Middle English intensifiers. Using evidence from the Helsinki Corpus, this investigation shows that both items modify the same type of adjectival heads, namely bounded subjective positive… read more
