Cover not available

In:Exploring Intensification: Synchronic, diachronic and cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Maria Napoli and Miriam Ravetto
[Studies in Language Companion Series 189] 2017
► pp. 55–78

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Chapter 3
Intensification processes in Italian

A survey

 | Università di Bologna
Published online: 30 September 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.189.04gra
Abstract
In this paper intensification will be considered an instantiation of evaluative morphology. Intensification will be defined as a uniform semantic-functional operation formally performed by different strategies. The main goal of this paper is to survey these formal strategies in order to understand the reciprocal relationships among them and in order to understand which of them can be considered the most typical expressions of this semantic operation. My main focus will be on Italian. After a brief survey of the constructions usually used to express intensification in contemporary Italian, I will concentrate on two specific issues: the synonymy among the intensifiers described in the first part of the article and the internal structure of constructions where more intensifiers are present at the same time. In this way, it will be possible to single out which are the most typical Italian intensifiers.
Article outline
  • 1.Intensification as evaluative morphology
  • 2.The data
    • 2.1A short state of the art
    • 2.2Italian intensive constructions
      • 2.2.1Two rising intensifying constructions?
      • 2.2.2Italian intensifiers
        • 2.2.2.1Affixation
        • 2.2.2.2Reduplication
        • 2.2.2.3Analytic constructions
  • 3.An intensification cline?
    • 3.1Multiple intensification
    • 3.2Synonymous intensifiers
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (34)
References
Aronoff, Mark. 1976. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baroni, Marco & Bernardini, Silvia (eds). 2006. Wacky! Working Papers on the Web as Corpus. Bologna: Gedit.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baroni, Marco & Ueyama, Motoko. 2006. Building general‑ and special-purpose corpora by Web crawling. In Proceedings of the 13th NIJL International Symposium, Language Corpora: Their Compilation and Application, 31–40. Tokyo: NIJL.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berlanda, Sara. 2013. Constructional intensifying adjectives in Italian. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2013), Atlanta, Georgia, 13–14 June 2013, 132–137.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernal, Elisenda. 2015. Catalan. In Grandi & Körtvélyessy (eds), 205–215.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1972. Degree Words. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cacchiani, Silvia. 2009. Lexico-functional categories and complex collocation: The case of intensifiers. In Exploring the Lexis-grammar Interface [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 35], Ute Römer & Rainer Schulze (eds), 229–246. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. Intensifying affixes across Italian and English. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 47(4): 758–794.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cimaglia, Riccardo. 2011. Intensificatori. In Enciclopedia dell’italiano, Raffaele Simone (ed.), 666–667. Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria. 2002. Intensification, modalisation et focalisation. Les différents effets des adverbes proprio, davvero et veramente. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Santis, Cristiana. 2011. Reduplicazione espressiva. In Enciclopedia dell’italiano, Raffaele Simone (ed.), 1224–1225. Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. “Cresci, cresci, cresci…”. La reduplicazione espressiva come strumento di espressione di relazioni transfrastiche. In Le relazioni logico-sintattiche. Teoria, sincronia, diacronia, Cristiana De Santis, Angela Ferrari, Gianluca Frenguelli, Francesca Gatta, Letizia Lala, Marco Mazzoleni & Michele Prandi (eds), 185–211. Roma: Aracne.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Merlini Barbaresi, Lavinia. 1994. Morphopragmatics: Diminutives and Intensifiers in Italian, German and Other Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gaeta, Livio. 2003. Produttività morfologica verificata su corpora: Il suffisso ‑issimo . In I nuovi media come strumenti per la ricerca linguistica, Franz Rainer & Achim Stein (eds), 43–60. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. Superlativo. In Enciclopedia dell’italiano, Raffaele Simone (ed.), 1431–1432. Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grandi, Nicola. 2002. Morfologie in contatto. Le costruzioni valutative nelle lingue del Mediterraneo. Milano: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. The place of evaluative morphology within morphology. In Grandi & Körtvélyessy (eds), 74–90.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grandi, Nicola & Körvélyessy, Livia. 2015. Introduction: Why evaluative morphology? In Grandi & Körtvélyessy (eds), 3–20.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grandi, Nicola & Körtvélyessy, Livia (eds). 2015. The Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology. Edinburgh: EUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hathout, Nabil, Montermini, Fabio & Tanguy, Ludovic. 2008. Extensive data for morphology: Using the World Wide Web. Journal of French Language Studies 18(1): 67–85. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Iacobini, Claudio. 2000. Base and direction of derivation. In Morphology. An International Handbook on Inflection and Word Formation, Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann & Joachim Mugdan (eds), 865–876, Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel. 1996. Universal tendencies in the semantics of the diminutive. Language 72(3): 533–578. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Medici, Mario. 1959a. Il tipo “caffè caffè”. Lingua Nostra 20: 84.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1959b. Superlativo di sostantivi. Lingua Nostra 20: 120–123.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montermini, Fabio. 2008. Il lato sinistro della morfologia. La prefissazione in italiano e nelle lingue del mondo. Milano: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Napoli, Maria. 2012. Uno stra-prefisso: L’evoluzione di stra- nella storia dell’italiano. Rivista Italiana di Linguistica e Dialettologia 14: 89–112.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. On Italian past participles with ‑issimo: The superlative of events between intensification and pluractionality. Linguistica e Filologia 33: 85–126.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. Nomi in stra- in italiano. Intensificazione tra semantica e pragmatica. In Actes du XXVII Congrès international de linguistique et de philologie romanes (Nancy, 15–20 juillet 2013). Section 1: Linguistique générale/linguistique romane, Alaine Lemaréchal, Peter Koch & Pierre Swiggers (eds), 95–105. Nancy: ATILF <[URL]>
Prieto, Victor M. 2015. The semantics of evaluative morphology. In Grandi & Körtvélyessy (eds), 21–31.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rainer, Franz. 1983. IntensivierungimItalienischen. Salzburg: Salzburgerromanistische Schriften.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scalise, Sergio. 1984. Generative Morphology. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van den Berg, René. 2015. Muna. In Grandi & Körtvélyessy (eds), 367–374.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1986. Italian reduplication: Cross-cultural pragmatics and illocutionary semantics. Linguistics 24: 287–315. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Roels, Linde
2025. La evolución reciente del intensificador mazo (de) en el lenguaje juvenil madrileño. Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures DOI logo
Spina, Stefania, Paolo Brasolin & Greta H. Franzini
2025. Detecting emerging vocabulary in a large corpus of Italian tweets. Research in Corpus Linguistics 13:1 ► pp. 139 ff. DOI logo
Spina, Stefania, Aivars Glaznieks & Andrea Abel
2025. Intensification in written L2 Italian. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 11:2 ► pp. 276 ff. DOI logo
Masini, Francesca & Simone Mattiola
2022. Syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs: a case study from Italian. Linguistics 60:1 ► pp. 315 ff. DOI logo
Van Goethem, Kristel & Isa Hendrikx
2021. Intensifying constructions in second language acquisition. In Constructions in Contact 2 [Constructional Approaches to Language, 30], ► pp. 375 ff. DOI logo
Hendrikx, Isa, Kristel Van Goethem & Stefanie Wulff
2019. Intensifying constructions in French-speaking L2 learners of English and Dutch. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 5:1 ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Italian Sign Language from a Cognitive and Socio-semiotic Perspective [Gesture Studies, 9], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2025. 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.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue