Intensifying affixes across Italian and English

This paper concentrates on the (dis-)similarities in meaning and uses of intensifying affixes across Italian and English nouns and adjectives adopting an integrated approach that brings together research on intensifiers (Paradis 2008), on intensifying and evaluative morphology in Italian and other languages (Grandi 2002; Montermini 2008) and on the morphopragmatics of Italian and other languages (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994). Specifically, we carried out a qualitative investigation into (partly) comparable corpora so as to have a means to support or revisit statements from encyclopaedic monolingual dictionaries which are typically used for categorial comparison in morphology (e.g. GRADIT, for Italian), as well as statements and current descriptions from the literature.As will be seen, this shall enable us to concentrate on the multiple dimensions along which intensifying affixes may differ or overlap both intra- and crosslinguistically, with special attention to quantity, degree, ±boundedness, the semantic shift from quantity to degree, and the interaction between semantic (degree) and pragmatic intensification.