ABSTRACT
In this chapter some basic distributional properties of head-adjacent intensifiers in Germanic languages are pointed out. Section 2.1 provides an overview of the position taken by the various intensifiers relative to their head DP and of their inflectional behaviour. In Section 2.2, semantic and pragmatic properties of environments licensing head-adjacent SELF are discussed. It is shown that a single condition governs the use of head-adjacent SELF, namely (discourse-pragmatic) ‘givenness’ or ‘accessibility’: headadjacent SELF combines only with definite DPs and a type of nominal that I call ‘given indefinites’, i.e. indefinites whose restriction set is under discussion. In other words, head-adjacent SELF can be used whenever the denotation of the head DP or part of it is in the propositional background. This will be highly relevant to the semantic analysis to be presented in Chapter 3.
