A corpus-based approach to the origin and development of the intensifier deadly in English
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Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
info
- Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel Fandiño (coord.)
- Begoña Crespo García (coord.)
- Inés Lareo Martín (coord.)
- Paula Lojo Sandino (coord.)
Publisher: Servizo de Publicacións ; Universidade da Coruña
ISBN: 978-84-9749-401-4
Year of publication: 2010
Volume Title: Part I, A-K
Volume: 1
Pages: 101-114
Congress: International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (2. 2010. A Coruña)
Type: Conference paper
Abstract
The necessity which speakers feel for constant innovation in language so as to achieve theircommunicative requirements makes intensification one of the most creative areas of language and,hence, one of the most unsteady. Intensifiers, as one of the strategies to mark intensification in language,have been a very fruitful topic of academic discussion, already from the beginning of the twentiethcentury. The advent of corpus linguistics, however, has propitiated new approaches to the subject, withinnumerable variationist and grammaticalisation studies on a wide variety of intensifiers.Following a corpus-based approach, this paper tackles the origin and development of the intensifierdeadly in the history of the English language, from its beginnings until the early twentieth century. Twodiachronic corpora of English, in addition to two major historical dictionaries (the Oxford EnglishDictionary and the Middle English Dictionary), have been selected as sources of evidence.