ABSTRACT

In previous research, a number of semantic or pragmatic distributional restrictions have been claimed to apply to head-distant intensifiers. They concern both properties of the head DP and of the associated predicates. In this chapter I will argue that most of these presumably grammatical generalizations merely relate to encyclopaedic knowledge and that the only ‘inviolable’ restrictions concern matters of information structure: exclusive SELF requires that the ‘event token’ described by the matrix predicate be in the prepositional background, while inclusive SELF imposes a parallel condition of accessibility on the predicate itself. We will start with exclusive SELF in Section 5.1 and turn to inclusive SELF in Section 5.2. The results are summarized in Section 5.3.