Search

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.

This chapter deals with the expression of coordination relations in compounding. Two macro-types of compounds are identified, namely hyperonymic coordinating compounds (co-compounds), where the referent of the compound is in a superordinate relationship to the meaning of the parts (as Mandarin dao-qiang 'sword+spear, weapons'), and hyponymic coordinate compounds, where the referent is in a subordinate relationship to the meaning of the parts (as English actor-director). The chapter also argues that the distribution of these two macro-types is not random but, rather, areally skewed: whereas co-compounds are common in the Eastern part of Eurasia, New Guinea and Mesoamerica, they seem to be absent in Standard Average European languages, where hyponymic coordinating compounds are formed quite freely. Moreover, while co-compounds may belong to different word classes, hyponymic coordinating compounds are (probably) never verbs