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 ass...

Condolence is part of Austin’s expressive speech act and is related to Searle’s behabitives illocutionary act. Although a theoretically sound issue in pragmatics, condolence speech act has not been investigated as much as other speech acts in discourse-related studies. This paper aims at investigating interjections and intensifiers while performing condolence speech act among Persian and Englis...

condolence is part of austin’s expressive speech act and is related to searle’s behabitives illocutionary act. although a theoretically sound issue in pragmatics, condolence speech act has not been investigated as much as other speech acts in discourse-related studies. this paper aims at investigating interjections and intensifiers while performing condolence speech act among persian and englis...

This study analyzes the types and frequencies of hedges and intensifiers employed in NS and NNS academic essays included in a corpus of L1 and L2 student academic texts (745 essays/220,747 words). The overarching goal of this investigation is to focus on these lexical and syntactic features of written discourse because they effectively lend themselves to instruction in L2 academic writing cours...

We present a method for determining the sentiment expressed by a customer review. The semantic orientation of a review can be positive, negative, or neutral. Our method counts positive and negative terms, but also takes into account contextual valence shifters, such as negations and intensifiers. Tests are done taking both negations and intensifiers into account, and also using only negations w...

This paper is a commentary on Beltrama and Bochnak (2015), who propose a uniform semantics for different uses of cross-categorial intensifiers -issimo in Italian and šému in Washo as universal quantifiers over contexts. Two concerns of their uniform semantics are raised, (i) unexpected restrictions on intensification, and (ii) non-truth-conditional intensification. It is argued that a uniform s...

The language used by women and men differ in all speech communities. In order to examine some of these variations, the present study aimed to investigate the differences in an informal written discourse. For this purpose, a comparison between men’s and women’s informal language was made regarding length of utterances, questions, intensifiers, and hedges. Results revealed that men employed highe...