Edited by Remus Gergel, Ingo Reich and Augustin Speyer
[Studies in Language Companion Series 224] 2022
► pp. 69–94
This article presents a corpus study of German intensifiers, which was conducted with the goal to test the hypothesis of Biedermann (1969) that intensifiers lose their expressivity over time. Following the author, frequently used intensifiers wear out, which results in a loss of expressivity. The goal of the study is to carry out evaluations in the form of synchronic and diachronic frequency distributions. The results show that the use of intensifiers has increased. According to the data, most of them are in an ascending phase and thus, yield no support for the hypothesized loss of expressivity. Further investigations are necessary to validate the above-mentioned hypothesis. Nevertheless, this study provides the first empirical evidence of an increasing use of German intensifiers.