Constructional Intensifying Adjectives in Italian

Grading is a primary cognitive operation that has an important expressive function. Information on degree is grammatically relevant and constitutes what Lazard (2006) calls a primary domain of grammaticalization: According to typological studies (Cuzzolin & Lehmann, 2004), many languages of the world have in fact at their disposal multiple grammatical devices to express gradation. In Italian, the class of superlativizing structures alternative to the morphological superlative is very rich and consists, among others, of adverbs of degree, focalizing adverbs and prototypical comparisons. This contribution deals with a particular analytic structure of superlative in Italian that is still neglected in the literature. This is what we will call Constructional Intensifying Adjectives (CIAs), adjectives which modify the intensity of other adjectives on the basis of regular semantic patterns, thus giving rise to multiword superlative constructions of the type: ADJX+ADJINTENS. A comparative quantitative corpus analysis demonstrates that this strategy, though paradigmatically limited, is nonetheless widely exploited: From a distributional point of view, some of these CIAs only combine with one or a few adjectives and form MWEs that appear to be completely lexicalized, while some others modify wider classes of adjectives thus displaying a certain degree of productivity.