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Exploring Intensification: Synchronic, diachronic and cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Maria Napoli and Miriam Ravetto
[Studies in Language Companion Series 189] 2017
► pp. 55–78

Chapter 3
Intensification processes in Italian

A survey

| Università di Bologna

In this paper intensification will be considered an instantiation of evaluative morphology. Intensification will be defined as a uniform semantic-functional operation formally performed by different strategies. The main goal of this paper is to survey these formal strategies in order to understand the reciprocal relationships among them and in order to understand which of them can be considered the most typical expressions of this semantic operation. My main focus will be on Italian. After a brief survey of the constructions usually used to express intensification in contemporary Italian, I will concentrate on two specific issues: the synonymy among the intensifiers described in the first part of the article and the internal structure of constructions where more intensifiers are present at the same time. In this way, it will be possible to single out which are the most typical Italian intensifiers.

Keywords: evaluative morphology, reduplication, prefixation, superlative, augmentative, suffixation, synonymy
Article outline
  • 1.Intensification as evaluative morphology
  • 2.The data
    • 2.1A short state of the art
    • 2.2Italian intensive constructions
      • 2.2.1Two rising intensifying constructions?
      • 2.2.2Italian intensifiers
        • 2.2.2.1Affixation
        • 2.2.2.2Reduplication
        • 2.2.2.3Analytic constructions
  • 3.An intensification cline?
    • 3.1Multiple intensification
    • 3.2Synonymous intensifiers
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 30 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.189.04gra
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