A corpus-based approach to the origin and development of the intensifier deadly in English

  1. Zeltia Blanco Suárez 1
  1. 1 Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
    info

    Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

    Santiago de Compostela, España

    ROR https://ror.org/030eybx10

Libro:
Language Windowing through Corpora
  1. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel Fandiño (coord.)
  2. Begoña Crespo García (coord.)
  3. Inés Lareo Martín (coord.)
  4. Paula Lojo Sandino (coord.)

Editorial: Servizo de Publicacións ; Universidade da Coruña

ISBN: 978-84-9749-401-4

Ano de publicación: 2010

Título do volume: Part I, A-K

Volume: 1

Páxinas: 101-114

Congreso: International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (2. 2010. A Coruña)

Tipo: Achega congreso

Resumo

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.