“It’s way too intriguing!” The fuzzy status of emergent intensifiers: A Functional Discourse Grammar account

Abstract

Abstract This article seeks to explore the function and linguistic status of non-central members of the class of “degree words,” focusing on specific cases in English and Spanish, namely, the English adverbs way and proper, the Spanish trendy phrase “Adj no, lo siguiente” and the adverb muy. These intensifiers will be explored in the light of the architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), specifically in relation to the levels of linguistic representation that are distinguished in this theory, mainly the Interpersonal (or pragmatic) Level (IL) and the Representational (or semantic) Level (RL) and in terms of FDG’s distinction between lexical and grammatical units. It will be shown that the various functional properties of these expressions can be easily accommodated in this theory. As intensifying devices, these expressions are represented as units specifying the Lexical Property at the RL. In addition, some of these expressions can be used with an emphatic function, pertaining to the set of pragmatic distinctions that are represented at the IL.