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1 INTRODUCTION the Aim of This Thesis Is to Examine Six INTRODUCTION The aim of this thesis is to examine six English intensifying adverbs: absolutely , completely, entirely, fully, totally and utterly . Although they are generally regarded as synonymous, there exist semantic nuances between them. Each of the lexemes creates different collocations and is associated with a different level of subjectivity. I will concentrate on these differences and restrictions and examine the collocational ranges of the intensifiers with the help of the British National Corpus. I will include statistics of their usage and define specific semantic features of individual adverbs. The thesis is divided into theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part contains six chapters dealing with the background. First I briefly introduce the category of adverbs and their syntactic and semantic functions. Next I define the adverbs of degree because this category traditionally includes the group of intensifiers I have selected. The following chapter presents the amplifiers themselves and their division and also pays attention to their position in a sentence. The fourth chapter discusses the complexity of synonymy. I state various views on this subject by several linguists with emphasis on absolute and cognitive synonymy. The next chapter is devoted to collocations as they form an important part of my research. The last chapter introduces the concept of corpus and its use in modern linguistics and offers a brief description of a website VIEW which I will work with. In the second, practical part I explain how I have chosen the six amplifiers and account for the reason why they are not to be taken as absolute synonyms. Then I provide definitions from five dictionaries and prove that the dictionaries are not sufficient for distinguishing the semantic shades between the intensifiers. The last chapter of the practical part deals with the actual analysis, it provides statistical data of their occurrence in various registers and make overviews of the most frequent collocations according to the BNC. Examining the expressions, I only work with adjectival collocations and take into account the connotations, the level of subjectivity or objectivity and formality or informality. 1 1. THEORETICAL PART 1. 1 ADVERBS Huddleston and Pullum (2002:562) define adverbs as “a grammatically distinct category of words whose members are characteristically used to modify verbs and other categories except nouns, especially adjectives and adverbs.” They divide adverbs into these three types: 1. simple adverbs, e.g. just, only, well 2. compound adverbs, e.g. somehow, therefore 3. derivational adverbs – the majority of them have the suffix –ly, by means of which new adverbs are created from adjectives, e.g. interestingly, oddly Huddleston (1988:120-121) defines adverbs as follows: a) Its central members characteristically modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. In languages which distinguish between adjectives and adverbs the primary difference is that adjectives modify nouns (or stand in a predicative relation to noun phrases) while adverbs modify verbs. b) Central members commonly express manner or degree; other frequent meanings (often associated with grammatically less central members) include time and place. c) It is commonly the case that many members, especially those belonging to the manner subclass, are morphologically derived from adjectives. Huddleston and Pullum (2002:263) mention that “the fact that adverbs can modify a wide range of expressions makes the category somewhat heterogeneous”. David Crystal (1995:211) agrees that “the adverb is the most heterogeneous of all the word classes in English grammar”. Moreover, Huddleston and Pullum (2002:563) maintain that traditional grammar included under this heading various items that did not “satisfy the more specific criteria for nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and conjunctions, and the adverb became a miscellaneous or residual category”. However, David Crystal (1995:211) claims that modern grammars have endeavoured to identify the main functions of the adverb and set up subclasses to handle the most divergent types. Adverbs then become a more coherent category (Huddleston and Pullum 2002:564). 2 1.1.1 THE SYNTACTIC FUNCTIONS OF ADVERBS Biber et al. (1999:540) claim that adverbs have two chief uses. They can be “integrated into an element of the clause or function themselves as an element of the clause. In the first case, the adverbs serve as modifiers ; in the second, they are adverbials .” Biber provides these examples: 1. First, Health service managers must be able to prize their services reasonably accurately for trading purposes . (a modifier) 2. I think she’ll be married shortly . (an adverbial) 1.1.2 THE SEMANTIC CATEGORIES OF ADVERBS Biber et al. (1999:552) argue that “adverbs cover a wide range of semantic categories.” Grammarians, however, have not agreed on a unified division of them. Only three groups are recognized generally: place, time and manner, and in most cases also degree. Scholars are then making up various additional groups: intensifiers and focusing adverbs (Chalker 1984:190), adverbs of stance, additive/restrictive adverbs and linking adverbs (Biber et al. 1999:556-558) or viewpoint adverbs and connectives (Alexander 1988:122). Huang (1975:30) establishes completely different types of adverbs, for example attitudinal adverbs, state-of- mind adverbs, performative adverbs, epistemic adverbs and resultative adverbs. Since my thesis deals with the intensifying adverbs, I will now concentrate on the adverbs of degree which traditionally include them, although some grammarians have created a special ‘category of intensifiers’ for them. 3 1.2 ADVERBS OF DEGREE Huang (1975:21) defines degree adverbs as follows: “Degree adverbs express the degree or extent of a certain quality or state and presuppose an analysis of the grading properties in the semantics of, especially, adjectives. These adverbs either serve to indicate descriptively something about the degree, as in “She was very tall” or indicate the speaker’s reaction to the degree, as in “She was surprisingly tall.” Biber et al. (1999:554) say that “they can be used to mark that the extent or degree is either greater or less than usual or than that of something else in the neighbouring discourse” and that “they occur as both adverbials and modifiers”. 1.2.1 LABELLING THE INTENSIFYING ADVERBS Collecting materials for the theoretical background, I have found out that there is no consistency in naming the group of intensifying adverbs. I have summed up the main concepts in this subchapter, trying to follow the time line. Bolinger (1972:242) labels these adverbs ‘relatively ungrammaticised intensifiers’ or ‘hyperbolic intensifiers’ and treats them as adverbs of “purity and veracity”. He includes thoroughly, totally, completely, utterly, absolutely, 100%, really, clean, unqualifiedly, genuinely, honestly into this group. Bäcklund (1973:194) calls them simply ‘adverbs expressing the highest degree’ and a similar view is presented by Verdieva et al. (1983:206), who place the adverbs under the heading ‘adverbs which denote a high point or the upper extreme on the intensity scale’ with subheading “to the greatest degree or extent”. Chalker (1984:190) and Alexander (1988:139) name them ‘intensifiers’, claiming that “an intensifier normally strengthens (or ‘intensifies’) the meaning” (Alexander 1988:139) although Quirk (1985:589) assures that intensifiers can express high as well as low point on an intensity scale. Therefore Quirk is inclined to name them ‘amplifiers’ (or ‘maximizers’ as well) and he is followed by Geoffrey Broughton (1990:146) in this respect. Biber et al. (1999:554) seem to combine these two views and denote the adverbs both ‘amplifiers’ and ‘intensifiers’. John Sinclair gives them a label of ‘emphasizing adverbs’ because they “add emphasis to the action described by a verb” (1990:294). Quirk, however, acknowledges emphasizers as a different group of adverbs (cf. Quirk 1985:583). Leech and Svartvik are more concerned with the syntactic function of amplifiers as 4 adverbials and particularly modifiers. They treat them as “adverbs indicating that the limit word’s meaning is used to its fullest extent” (1994:154). Huddleston and Pullum denote these expressions either ‘degree adverbs in –ly’ or ‘degree modifiers’ (2002:583), or include them into ‘the maximal subgroup’ (2002:721). They add that “these items indicate a degree at the top end of the scale” (2002:721). Hence the terminology is rather confused and sometimes misleading. From my point of view the most accurate label is provided by Quirk and I find it suitable for my thesis as well. Therefore I decided to use the term ‘amplifiers’ and also the second most frequent label ‘intensifiers’ for the group of selected adverbs. 5 1.3 AMPLIFIERS The most thorough and accurate presentation of the amplifiers is offered by Quirk et al. who devote them a whole chapter (Quirk et al. 1985). He describes them as the “intensifier subjuncts” that are “broadly concerned with the semantic category of degree” (1985:589). However, he calls attention to the fact that “the term ‘intensifier’ does not refer only to means whereby an increase in intensification is expressed. Rather, an intensifying subjunct indicates a point on an abstractly conceived intensity scale; and the point indicated may be relatively low or relatively high” (ibid., 589) He distinguishes two subsets of intensifiers (ibid., 589-590) I. amplifiers - maximizers (e.g.: completely ) -
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