The Grammatical Environment of Intensifier-Noun Collocations: Insights from Lexical Priming Theory

Abstract

A recurrent topic in collocational research is the idiosyncratic distribution of intensifiers with nearly equivalent meanings. So far, this phenomenon has been mostly investigated from the perspective of the control exerted by the lexical context. In the case of adjective–noun collocations, this implies an almost exclusive focus on the nominal head. In this paper, we draw the attention towards the role that colligation –i.e. preferences for particular grammatical contexts– exerts on the selection of intensifying adjectives. Drawing on insights from Hoey’s lexical priming theory –in particular, the concept of nesting–, we conducted two corpus-based case studies involving collocations of intensifying adjectives with two different nouns in English (attention and fear). The results suggest that the selection of intensifier is sensitive to the interplay of lexical collocation and grammatical context.