The Pragmatic Role Of Intensifiers In American Media Political Discourse

Abstract

The intensity category is one of the debatable categories in modern language science. It is in a complex relationship with objective and subjective categories. The intensity category also correlates with the concept of intensification, which is a quantitative qualification of a feature and a kind of assessment in a broad sense. The aim of the work is to identify different-level intensifying means related to the expressive means of the English language. The relevance of the study of intensifying means in the language is quite high due to the ambiguous understanding of this category and its polyfunctionality. The new information and communication environment has a huge impact on changing the mechanisms of using different language means in communication and this opens up prospects for new research. The object of the analysis was the media texts of the political discourse of American online media, such as The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The work analyzes graphic, lexical, grammatical (morphological and syntactic) intensifying means and their interaction for expressing amplifying semantics. Intensifiers help the author to express his subjective attitude to objects and phenomena, to form the desired emotions and assessments in the addressee. To enhance the evaluative and emotive properties, lexical units were most often used, including words - ly. As a rule, these are units with descriptive-emotive semantics. Of course, the category of intensity can be defined as a semantic category of a pragmatic nature.