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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 23:2 (2022) ► pp.285–326

From adverb to intensifier

Corpus-based research in diachronic linguistics on the example of the Polish words okrutnie (‘cruelly’), strasznie (‘terribly’) and szalenie (‘madly’)

| University of Silesia
| University of Silesia
| University of Silesia
This paper aims is to analyse the status of selected Polish words: okrutnie (‘cruelly’), strasznie (‘terribly’) and szalenie (‘madly’). These units are traditionally considered to be adverbs, and their formal structure and original meaning indicate derivation from proper adjectives. We presume that adverbs might develop into intensifiers, which are semantically close to bardzo (‘very’). By analysing the linguistic material extracted from chronologically differentiated corpora of Polish (korba, kf19 and nkjp), we want to show how this linguistic process has been evolving over the centuries. Our research examines quantitative and qualitative collocational data of okrutnie, strasznie and szalenie with their categorical value and semantic evaluation (positive, neutral and negative). Our research reveals that the changing of words’ meaning, and their syntactic function, switched from the object language to the metalanguage level, is a feature associated with grammaticalization. We used a statistical chi-square test to verify the probability of word co-occurrence.
Keywords: adverbs, diachronic corpora, historical linguistics, intensifiers, Polish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research questions
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the occurrences: okrutnie (‘cruelly’), strasznie (‘terribly’) and szalenie (‘madly’) in korba
    • 4.1Quantitative and qualitative analysis of occurrences of the unit okrutnie (‘cruelly’)
    • 4.2Quantitative and qualitative analysis of occurrences of the unit strasznie (‘terribly’)
    • 4.3Quantitative and qualitative analysis of occurrences of the unit szalenie (‘madly’)
  • 5.Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the occurrences: okrutnie (‘cruelly’), strasznie (‘terribly’) and szalenie (‘madly’) in kf19
    • 5.1Quantitative and qualitative analysis of occurrences of the unit okrutnie (‘cruelly’)
    • 5.2Quantitative and qualitative analysis of occurrences of the unit strasznie (‘terribly’)
    • 5.3Quantitative and qualitative analysis of occurrences of the unit szalenie (‘madly’)
  • 6.Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collocations: okrutnie (‘cruelly’), strasznie (‘terribly’) and szalenie (‘madly’) in nkjp
    • 6.1Quantitative and qualitative analysis of collocations of the unit okrutnie (‘cruelly’)
    • 6.2Quantitative and qualitative analysis of collocations of the unit strasznie (‘terribly’)
    • 6.3Quantitative and qualitative analysis of collocations of the unit szalenie (‘madly’)
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • Dictionaries
  • References
Published online: 21 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.19009.pas
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Electronic Corpus of the 17th and 18th c. Polish Texts (until 1772). Accessed January to June 2019 at: [URL] – korba .
Corpus of the Polish Language 1830–1918. Accessed January to June 2019 at: [URL] – kf19 .
National Corpus of Polish. Accessed January to June 2019 at: [URL] – nkjp.
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