Compromiser - a notional paradigm

Carita Paradis

doi:10.7146/hjlcb.v7i13.25081

Abstract

On the basis of an investigation of the lexical forms quite, rather, fairly, and pretty in contemporary spoken British English, I postulate that these lexical items form a notional paradigm of compromiser within the category of degree modifiers. Compromisers are cognitive synonyms that occupy the middle of an abstract intensity scale, approximating a mean degree of another word, eg quite / rather / fairly / pretty dirty. They are all polysemous and poly-functional words, whose meanings are determined by a crucial semantic trait ‘to a moderate degree’ on the paradigmatic axis, and by a semantic-syntactic, selection-licensing mechanism on the syntagmatic axis.

Highlights

This paper will be devoted to the lexical forms quite, rather, fairly, and pretty and I will postulate that they form a notional paradigm of compromiser within the category of degree modifiers
Lexical elements are cognitive synonyms if they share one or more central and logically necessary semantic trait, crucial to the determination of their truth-conditions, whereas they may differ with respect to peripheral traits such as idiosyncratic collocational restrictions and connotative meanings (Cruse 1986:270-285)
I work on the assumption that there is a notional paradigm of compromiser, based on the region of an intensity scale that it occupies, and that the lexical forms quite, rather, fairly, and pretty are members of that paradigm in certain linguistic contexts

Summary

Introduction

This paper will be devoted to the lexical forms quite, rather, fairly, and pretty and I will postulate that they form a notional paradigm of compromiser within the category of degree modifiers. 13 – 1994 scale downwards, such as slightly and a bit They are interesting because they are polysemous and poly-functional lexical forms, which diachronically have undergone a process of grammaticalization from proper content words to lexically bleached words of a more functional character (see Traugott 1982, Ungerer 1988, Hopper and Traugott 1993). The fact that they are lexically bleached makes them vague, context dependent, and semantically flexible. The procedure will be as follows: I will first briefly present the paradigm typology model for the description of degree modifiers; I will discuss the linguistic constraints that are crucial to the definition of the paradigm of compromiser; and I will conclude by summing it all up

Paradigm typology

The compromiser paradigm

Conclusion