Cover not available
Part of
Exploring Intensification: Synchronic, diachronic and cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Maria Napoli and Miriam Ravetto
[Studies in Language Companion Series 189] 2017
► pp. 173–192

Chapter 8
Intensifiers between grammar and pragmatics

A lesson from a language contact situation

| Università dell’Insubria
Intensification is a more pervasive phenomenon than usually thought, involving modification and scaling at different levels. Besides adjectives and adverbs, also the epistemic stance and the illocutionary force of speech acts can be modulated (Bazzanella et al. 1991; Ghezzi 2013). The strategies speakers use to weaken or intensify the speaker’s epistemic stance and the illocutionary force of the utterance include the class of so-called discourse markers (Bazzanella 1995, 2006), such as, for instance, hedges and boosters, which are hearer-oriented and “work as social and politeness markers” (Bazzanella 2006: 463), and modalizers, which modify the speaker’s commitment towards the propositional content. This article aims to investigate these strategies in a specific language contact situation, which turns out to be a privileged vantage point to tease out the manifestations of intensification in everyday language use. We will focus on the Ladin-Italian (and German) contact area in Trentino-South Tyrol (Northern Italy), with a view to identifying the strategies that bilingual speakers adopt to express intensification in their speech. The results of the investigation show that there are different borrowability rates in the adoption of intensifiers from the pragmatically dominant languages (Italian and German), whereby intensifiers with a strong intersubjective function such as those modifying the illocutionary force of the utterance are borrowed more easily than intensifiers operating at lower (i.e. propositional or subjective) levels.
Keywords: intensifiers, language contact, pragmatics, Ladin, Italian, borrowing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Intensifiers between grammar and pragmatics
  • 2.Intensifiers in language contact situations
  • 3.Methodology and data
  • 4.Intensifiers in spoken Ladin
    • 4.1Fassa valley
    • 4.2Badia and Gardena valleys
  • 5.Contrasting levels
  • 6.Discussion and final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.189.09fio
References (40)
References
Aijmer, Karin & Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. 2011. Pragmatic markers. In Discursive Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics 8], Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman & Jef Verschueren (eds), 223–247. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Antonini, Francesca & Moretti, Bruno. 2000. Le immagini dell’italiano regionale. La variazione linguistica nelle valutazioni dei giovani ticinesi. Locarno: Armando Dadò.Google Scholar
Athanasiadou, Angeliki. 2007. On the subjectivity of intensifiers. Language Sciences 29: 554–565. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Auer, Peter. 1999. From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech. International Journal of Bilingualism 3: 309–332. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla. 1995. I segnali discorsivi. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, Vol. III, Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi & Anna Cardinaletti (eds), 225–257. Bologna: il Mulino.Google Scholar
. 2006. Discourse markers in Italian: Towards a ‘compositional’ meaning. In Approaches to Discourse Particles, Kerstin Fischer (ed), 449–464. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla, Caffi, Claudia & Sbisà, Marina. 1991. Scalar dimensions of illocutionary force. In Speech Acts: Fiction or Reality?, Igor Zagar (ed.), 63–76. Ljubljana: Institute for Social Sciences.Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla. 2011. Segnali discorsivi. In Enciclopedia dell’italiano. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana Giovanni Treccani [Online].Google Scholar
Berruto, Gaetano. 2007. Situazioni sociolinguistiche e tutela delle lingue minoritarie. Considerazioni alla luce della Survey Ladins. Mondo Ladino 31: 37–63.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight L. 1972. Degree Words. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carli, Augusto. 2000. La situazione sociolinguistica della Ladinia dolomitica. In Heimat. Identità regionali nel processo storico, Antonio Pasinato (ed.), 353–366, Roma: Donzelli Editore.Google Scholar
Dal Negro, Silvia & Fiorentini, Ilaria. 2014. Reformulation in bilingual speech: Italian cioè in German and Ladin. Journal of Pragmatics 74: 94–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dell’Aquila, Vittorio & Iannàccaro, Gabriele. 2006. Survey Ladins. Usi linguistici nelle Valli Ladine. Trento: Regione Autonoma Trentino-Alto Adige.Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Merlini Barbaresi, Lavinia. 1994. Morphopragmatics. Diminutives and Intensifiers in Italian, German, and Other Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fiorentini, Ilaria. 2014. Segnali discorsivi italiani in situazione di contatto linguistico. Il caso del ladino delle valli dolomitiche. PhD dissertation, University of Pavia.Google Scholar
. 2017. Italian discourse markers and modal particles in contact. In Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles. New Perspectives, Chiara Fedriani & Andrea Sansò (eds), 419–439. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ghezzi, Chiara. 2013. Vagueness Markers in Contemporary Italian: Intergenerational Variation and Pragmatic Change. PhD dissertation, University of Pavia.Google Scholar
Ghezzi, Chiara & Molinelli, Piera. 2014. Italian guarda, prego, dai. Pragmatic markers and the left and right periphery. In The Role of the Left and Right Periphery in Semantic Change, Kate Beeching & Ulrich Detges (eds), 117–150. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Hansen, Maj-Britt Mosegaard. 2006. A dynamic polysemy approach to the lexical semantics of discourse markers (with an exemplary analysis of French “toujours”). In Approaches to Discourse Particles [Studies in Pragmatics 1], Kerstin Fischer (ed.), 21–41. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Ito, Rika & Tagliamonte, Sali. 2003. Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 32: 257–279. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1984. Intensity. In Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, Deborah Schiffrin (ed.), 43–70. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Léglise, Isabelle & Chamoreau, Claudine. 2013. Variation and change in contact settings. In The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings [Studies in Language Variation 12], Isabelle Léglise & Claudine Chamoreau (eds), 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maschler, Yael. 1991. The language games bilinguals play: Language alternation at language game boundaries. Language and Communication 11(4): 263–289. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1994. Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversation. Language in Society 23: 325–366. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1997. Emergent bilingual grammar: The case of contrast. Journal of Pragmatics 28: 279–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000. What can bilingual conversation tell us about discourse markers? Introduction to the special issue on “Discourse Markers in Bilingual Conversation”. International Journal of Bilingualism 4: 437–445. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. Metalanguage in Interaction: Hebrew Discourse Markers [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 181]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matras, Yaron. 1998. Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing. Linguistics 36(2): 281–331. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000. Fusion and the cognitive basis for bilingual discourse markers. International Journal of Bilingualism 4(4): 505–528. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007. The borrowability of structural categories. In Matras & Sakel (eds), 31–73.Google Scholar
. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matras, Yaron & Sakel, Jeanette (eds). 2007. Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-linguistic Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mithun, Marianne. 1988. The grammaticisation of coordination. In Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse [Typological Studies in Language 18], John Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds), 331–359. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu & Rissanen, Matti. 2002. Fairly pretty or pretty fair? On the development and grammaticalization of English downtoners. Language Sciences 24: 359–380. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paradis, Carita. 2008. Configurations, construals and change: Expressions of DEGREE. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 317–343. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana. 1980. Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of codeswitching. Linguistics 18: 581–618. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. 2008. Almost certainly and most definitely: Degree modifiers and epistemic stance. Journal of Pragmatics 40: 1521–1542. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stolz, Christel & Stolz, Thomas. 1996. Funktionswortentlehnung in Mesoamerika. Spanisch-amerindischer Sprachkontakt [Hispanoindiana II]. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 49(1): 86–123.Google Scholar
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Kaufman, Terrence. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Соколова, О.В.
2022. Blastas a Verbal Weapon in the British Literary Avant-garde and Politics: Polysemy, Multifunctionality, Multimodality. Part 1. Иностранные языки в высшей школе :4(59) ► pp. 24 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.