An all-important question for humans, death is unsurprisingly used as a source of intensification in language, perhaps even cross-linguistically. This book explores the use of death for intensification purposes in English and aims to shed light on how certain forms from this semantic field came to be used with an intensifying function over time, specifically dead(ly), mortal(ly) and to death. The author provides a full account of the evolution of these intensifiers from their origins up to present-day English from the perspective of grammaticalisation and other concomitant phenomena. To this end, this corpus-based research resorts to evidence from historical dictionaries, diachronic corpora and electronic collections. The study conducted, unprecedented in the number of examples analysed, combines both a qualitative and a quantitative approach to provide the most comprehensive picture of the long diachrony of these intensifiers.
This book presents a diachronic corpus-based study of death-related intensifiers from a grammaticalisation perspective, offering a full account of the evolution of these forms from their origins up to present-day English. To this end, evidence from historical dictionaries, diachronic corpora and electronic collections is examined.
Contents: Introduction Intensification and intensifiers in language
Grammaticalisation English intensifiers: A historical overview
Methodology A corpus-based analysis of death-related intensifiers in
English Concluding remarks and suggestions for future research.
Zeltia Blanco-Suárez is Senior Lecturer at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She was actively involved in the compilation of the legal component of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers 3.2 and the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 15351999. Her research interests include historical and corpus linguistics.
