Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University)

Intensification, Composition and Goldilocks

The semantics of intensifiers (“very”, “terribly”, “pretty”) is often claimed to be rather impoverished. According to Cliff’s multiplicative hypothesis (Cliff 1959), such adverbs simply signal a value that expresses the extent to which the meaning of the adjective that the intensifier combines with should be boosted or diminished. In line with this, intensifiers are often bleached of their original meaning (Stoffel 1901). For instance, combinations like “terribly nice” or “pretty ugly” are not contradictory, showing that the meaning of underlying adjective is not active in the meaning of the adverb.

In this talk, however, I argue that there is more content to intensifiers than meets the eye. In particular, I show that the evaluative polarity (in the sense of Osgood et al. 1957) of an intensifier co-determines its boosting or mitigating function. For instance, adverbs stemming from evaluatively positive adjective like “fairly”, “pretty” tend to express medium degree, while adverbs stemming from negative adjectives like “terribly” tend to express high degree. I explain this by alluding to the concept of a Goldilocks principle. I show that there are non-trivial consequences for the composition of intensifiers and adjectives. In particular, it challenges the common assumption that the vague interpretation of an adjective stems from a silent degree head POS (Kennedy 2007).