Proceedings of the 6 th Annual Meeting of the Gesellschaft

This paper deals with the syntax and semantics of the German adverbial intensifying particle selbst/selber as in Paul hat seine Wäsche selbst gewaschen ‘Paul has done his washing himself.’ I will claim that selbst denotes the identity function, and that it takes the agentive Voice head proposed by Kratzer (1996) as its semantic argument. This minimal semantics will be combined with standard assumptions about information structure to derive the specific contextual restrictions encountered with adverbial intensifiers. Section 1 prepares the ground for this analysis by presenting a similar account of adnominal intensifiers as in Paul selbst hat seine Wäsche gewaschen ‘Paul himself has done his washing’. The discussion of adnominal intensifiers adopts basic insights arrived at by Moravcsik (1972), König (1991), Siemund (2000a) and Eckardt (2000). Section 2 constitutes the main body of the paper. First some effort is made to tell apart adnominal from adverbial uses of intensifiers by using criteria that do not just rely on (surface) position. I will oppose Eckardt’s position that most adverbial intensifiers are interpreted like adnominal intensifiers; moreover I will note a close link between adverbial intensifiers and agentivity which justifies dubbing adverbial intensifiers “agentive intensifiers” (section 2.1). Tasks to be dealt with in the following are identified in section 2.2, at the same time previous proposals and categorizations are reviewed. Section 2.3 introduces the analysis in terms of Voice. 1 Adnominal intensifiers In this section I will give a very brief survey of problems relating to the analysis of adnominal intensifiers, i.e. of expressions such as herself as in the queen herself. The research tradition will be exemplified by two different approaches.1 In the end I will adopt the general idea of Eckardt’s (2000) account which takes adnominal intensifiers to be lexicalizations of the identity function which interact with information structure in a standard way. Even though the present paper is mainly concerned with the analysis of adverbial intensifiers as in Gina baked the cake herself (see section 2), the discussion of the adnominal case will help us to pave the way for the parallel, albeit more complex, adverbial case. Let us start with the sentence in (1). (1) The artist herself will be present. This sentence is true in a situation in which the artist will be present (let’s say, at the opening of a sales exhibition), and with a single focus accent on herSELF it is felicitous only if there * This paper was written in the context of a research project supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Ko 497/5-1/2/3). I owe thanks to all the members of our stimulating research group, but Volker Gast, Insa Gülzow, Ekkehard König and Peter Siemund have clearly helped me most to sharpen the ideas underlying this work. The audience at Sinn und Bedeutung 6 was likewise very supportive. Daniel Büring and Hans-Heinrich Lieb have repeatedly taken a very helpful interest in the topics treated in this paper. Ruth Wishart has helped me with some of the English data. Mistakes are mine. 1 In-depth reviews of previous proposals, and the relevant references, can be found in Siemund (2000a).