Abstract
<p>Using the Polish National Corpus (NKJP), the author discusses 31 Polish reinforcing adverbs to determine the degree of their semantic specificity and freedom of connection with adjectives. Empowering adverbs express the person’s judgement, attitudes, and emotions. The author shows that most of the reinforcing adverbs have not deviated from their etymology, even though they are considered synonyms of the word “very”: their etymological meanings influence the choice of the adjective. The most frequently reinforced adjectives in NKJP are “difficult”, “important” and “essential”.</p>
Highlights
Using the Polish National Corpus (NKJP), the author discusses 31 Polish reinforcing adverbs to determine the degree of their semantic specificity and freedom of connection with adjectives
The author shows that most of the reinforcing adverbs have not deviated from their etymology, even though they are considered synonyms of the word “very”: their etymological meanings influence the choice of the adjective
According to Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum (2002: 585), “intensifier” is a term for a modifier that makes no contribution to the propositional meaning of a clause but serves to enhance and give additional emotional context to the word it modifies
Summary
According to Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum (2002: 585), “intensifier” is a term for a modifier that makes no contribution to the propositional meaning of a clause but serves to enhance and give additional emotional context to the word it modifies. The final word in this group, piekielnie (“infernally”, “hellishly”), combines with the most diverse group of adjectives (22 collocations), suggesting that it is most semantically bleached It seems that the intensifiers in this group are highly specialized and retain the core meaning of their root words. Of the four intensifiers derived from words which mean “mad”, three are fairly specialized and occur with select adjectives, while the fourth, szalenie is among the most common adverbs used to modify adjectives in Polish and there seems to be little connection any more to the meaning of szał (“rage”, “fury”, “madness”) which is at its root. Adverbs which contain a negative prefix nie- “not/un-” or bez- “without” tend to modify mostly positive features
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