Abstract
ABSTRACTThe present approach estimates the strength of intensifiers in Dutch by computing their information values in a language corpus, that is, contextual information content (Cohen Priva, 2008; Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2011) and Shannon Information (Shannon & Weaver, 1948), to respectively explain the use value and the expressive value of intensifiers when they intensify a predicative adjective. Conflicting strength values help in understanding the high number of intensifiers commonly available in particular languages and the constant need for adding new ones. Our approach underlines the relevance of two measures of information content (IC) for ranking intensifiers: (i) IC in context: the more combinatorial or transitional options an intensifier has, the higher its contextual information content and consequently its use value; and (ii) IC in relation to all alternative intensifiers: the higher the surprisal value that the occurrence of an intensifier evokes, the higher its expressive value. We shall investigate the validity of these two measures by researching a large corpus of Dutch tweets and shall test whether the values of these two measures can predict the stacking order in sequences of intensifiers.
Highlights
This paper addresses the use and expressive values of intensifiers in Dutch based on their usage profile in a language corpus
If intensifiers still possess the semantic properties of their original word classes, i.e., if bleaching is not completed, they tend to be positioned close to the adjective or attribute to be intensified and may not be the first element in a chain of intensifiers
In Dutch this set includes the intensifiers erg ‘very’, heel ‘total’, zeer ‘very’, and zo ‘so’. These standard intensifiers do not have a high expressive value, but this is compensated by their high use value (Dahl, 2004): this means that they can be freely used in combinations with the word they intensify, in our case, predicative adjectives
Summary
This paper addresses the use and expressive values of intensifiers in Dutch based on their usage profile in a language corpus. In Dutch this set includes the intensifiers erg ‘very’, heel ‘total’, zeer ‘very’ (ten Buuren et al, 2018), and zo ‘so’ These standard intensifiers do not have a high expressive value, but this is compensated by their high use value (Dahl, 2004): this means that they can be freely used in combinations with the word they intensify, in our case, predicative adjectives. As half of the 14,658 occurrences were the substandard variant, this finding shows that CMC communication often triggers informal, spoken forms These tweets happened to contain many intensifiers, and in selecting the tweets we were permissive in allowing all sorts of intensifiers, the decisive criterion being that the word in question was meant to increase the intensity of the adjective. The enormous productivity of the set of intensifiers is illustrated by the list of 200 different intensifiers presented in ten Buuren et al (2018) for Dutch in the Netherlands
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