Two sides of the same coin?
Tracking the history of the intensifiers deadly and
mortal
This chapter presents a corpus-based study on the origin and
development of two death-related intensifiers: the adjectives and adverbs
deadly and mortal. The historical sources consulted
reveal that these forms have progressively adopted more general meanings, that is, they
have come to be grammaticalized as intensifiers over time. Two semantic variables, type
of meaning (descriptive, affective, or intensifying, along the lines of Adamson 2000) and semantic prosody (Stubbs 1995), were central to the collocational
diachronic analysis undertaken here. The study focuses on British English and covers the
history of deadly and mortal from their origins in Old
English and Middle English, respectively, to the 20th century.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Intensifiers: An overview
- 3.Data sources
- 4.Deadly and mortal: A historical account
- 4.1Preliminary remarks
- 4.2Deadly and mortal: The origins
- 4.3Deadly and mortal: EModE
- 4.4Deadly and mortal: LModE and PDE
- 5.The grammaticalization of deadly and
mortal
- 6.Concluding remarks
-
Notes
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References