ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the function and meaning of head-adjacent intensifiers. The analysis will proceed using data from English only, but I will assume that it applies to the head-adjacent intensifiers of all other Germanic languages considered in this study as well. The chapter is organized as follows: Section 3.1 provides a description of the function of head-adjacent intensifiers in terms of the kind of reference to alternatives that is made. In Section 3.2, it is shown that the function of intensifiers at the sentence level can be derived compositionally if we assume that intensifiers denote the identity function ID (cf. Eckardt 2001; Hole 2002a). A slight modification of Eckardt’s and Hole’s view is proposed in Section 3.3. This section is also intended to prepare the ground for a parallel analysis of head-distant intensifiers in Chapter 6. In Section 3.4, the analysis of intensifiers as expressions of an identity function is evaluated against empirical generalizations made by the most comprehensive descriptive studies on intensifiers to date (Siemund 2000; König and Siemund 2000a, b, c). Previous analyses of headadjacent intensifiers are reviewed critically in Section 3.5.
