Adjective Intensifiers in German

Abstract

While the study of English intensifiers has been a topic of much empirical discussion (Bolinger 1972, Paradis 1997, Ito & Tagliamonte 2003, Xiao & Tao 2007, Fuchs 2017), intensification in the German language is underexplored. The present study operationalizes variationist methods to comprehensively examine the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German by investigating how adjective intensifiers rank empirically in terms of frequency and whether their use is sensitive to the social factors gender and age. Results indicate that in German, amplifiers are more frequent than downtoners, boosters are more frequent than maximizers, and the gender and the age of the speaker are factors that influence their use. These findings corroborate crosslinguistic findings (Peters 1994, Broekhuis 2013, D’Arcy 2015, Fuchs 2017). Broadly speaking, the present study suggests that the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German is, in many ways, similar to what has been observed previously in other Germanic languages.*