Talk:Intensifier

deletion, edit

Ish_ishwar, Thanks for your attention to this new article. I appreciate your feedback. You give a list of linguistics books. Which do you consider the best reference that defines grammatical intensifier so as to exclude the examples you deleted? I'll check it out of the library. Also, before I wrote it, the Intensifier article redirected to Adverbial phrase. Do intensifiers not occur as part of adverbial phrases often enough to say "often"? Unless I'm missing something, your two edits contradict each other, because you asserted that intensifiers often occur outside of adverbial phrases but you deleted the only examples that weren't adverbs. -- Keith Cascio (talk) 03:56, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

hi.

(1) Those books do not address anything syntactic and so are not relevant here.

(2) A good introduction to English grammar is Rodney Huddleston's English grammar: An outline (1988).

(3) I removed oh yes and myself which do not behave anything like words like very or extremely which are words that should be topic of this article. Any adequate description of English will not group these together.

(4) Linguistic approaches to syntax come from two perspectives: one is functional, the other is formal. Attention to form looks at constituent pieces that form sentences. One such piece is a noun phrase. All of these constituents will also have grammatical functions. So, a noun phrase can function as a direct object, a subject, an indirect object, the complement of a preposition, or adverbially. It seems to me that you are not distinguishing between these two views.

Adverbial phrases are not constituent types rather they are set of different constituent types that have an adverbial function. In other words, they are phrases that act adverbially. This is in contrast to an adverb phrase (where adverb refers to a prototypical adverb like quickly) which is a constituent type (and has an adverbial function as well).

(5) Intensifiers defined usefully in a narrow sense are a small class of words that modify adjectives and (prototypical) adverbs. They will occur in syntactic frames like the following:

_____ + ADVERB

_____ + ADJECTIVE

You cannot put oh yes and myself in this syntactic frame.

The man with the umbrella quickly knocked on the door.

The man with the umbrella very quickly knocked on the door.

cf.:

*The man with the umbrella oh yes quickly knocked on the door.

*The man with the umbrella myself quickly knocked on the door.

(6) Since adjective phrases with intensifiers can modify nouns within noun phrases, and noun phrases can have several different functions (I identified 5 above) of which only one is adverbial, then saying that intensifiers occur often inside of adverbial phrases is rather uninformative.

(7) Note that giving the label intensifier to words like very and extremely is done in the first so that they can be distinguished from prototypical adverbs which behave rather differently. Under this nomenclature intensifier ≠ adverb. They are different beasts with different syntactic restrictions and distributions.

– ishwar  (speak) 00:05, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi, I borrowed the worthwhile 1988 Huddleston. Thank you. I find it useful that it proposes a modern theory, as opposed to a "traditional grammar". For example, Huddleston's determination that Modern English lacks a future tense seems reasonable, clear and useful. He concerns himself primarily with form, but he mentions form's relationship to function. I want this article, Intensifier, to address both function and form coherently and satisfyingly. Huddleston gives some useful hints about the hazards of such ambition in a passage on notional definitions vs. formal grammatical definitions:

‘A noun is the name of a person, place or thing’ and ‘An imperative clause is one that is used as a command or request’ are both examples of what are commonly called notional definitions – definitions based on the SEMANTIC properties of expressions, i.e. their meaning, rather than on their grammatical FORM. Notional definitions are unsatisfactory at the language-particular level because the relation between categories of grammatical form and categories of meaning is normally too complex for us to be able to define the former in terms of the latter. A central task for the grammarian is precisely to show how categories of grammatical form are related to categories of meaning: a notional definition at the language-particular level thus confuses the very things that we need to distinguish and relate. (Huddleston 1988 page 4)

I want to avoid confusing syntax and meaning, but I want this article to address the notion of intensification because, it seems to me, when we recognize, acknowledge, name and talk about a category called intensifier, attention to meaning (semantics, function) motivates us more than attention to form (syntax, grammar). The most salient thing about intensifiers is their LACK of meaning – the fact that they merely add emotional intensity to the meaning of another word. The grammatical distinction in contrast to prototypical adverbs of some adverb-like words (more precisely, à la Huddleston, lexicogrammatical-words) that accomplish the notion of intensification, i.e. the distinction that they never modify verbs, need not be peculiar to intensifiers. Am I correct that there are other words commonly classified as adverbs that never modify verbs but are not intensifiers? Is the word "theoretically" such an example? Perhaps we could write another article about the problems with the open class adverb, but there's already a section in adverb titled Adverbs as a "catch-all" category. Nevertheless, I agree this article should emphasize that, grammatically, intensifiers differ from prototypical adverbs, since they never modify verbs. On page 121, Huddleston illustrates with the ungrammatical *[We liked it] very (α).

– Keith Cascio (talk) 22:13, 30 January 2010 (UTC)