The role of suffixation in encoding highest/lowest intensity in Romanian and Spanish

Any theoretical analysis of a fragment of reality is carried out by means of abstract models and aims to capture the specificity of a phenomenon. Theorising may nevertheless prove insufficient if its descriptive analysis is not doubled by the establishment of regularities, so that the current state of the phenomenon and its subsequent evolution may be explained. This general framework also includes linguistic intensification, which reveals one’s permanent need to evaluate everything that enters one’s sphere of perception: objects, beings, states, processes etc. The means of expressing “intensity” are most diverse and, implicitly, sensitive to any type of nuancing of the speaker, because it uncloses the shape its mental representation socially takes. This paper aims to highlight a certain aspect in the complex act of evaluation, namely expressing highest/lowest intensity by means of suffixes. The study relies on the analysis of two modern related languages, Romanian and Spanish, and the corpus has been essentially selected from the most modern form of human communication, the computer-mediated one.