From demonstratives to degree words: on the origin of the intensifying function of this/that in american english

Abstract

The intensifying function of this/that can be traced back to the 14th century, when they acquired their adverbial status as a result of a grammaticalization process that turned them from deictic demonstratives into degree adverbs with the meaning of ‘to this/that extent, so much, so’ (OED s.v. this/that adv.). These intensifiers have had different ups and downs in the history of English. In spite of their origin in Late Middle English, they are practically not attested from the 16th to the 18th centuries, starting to appear again from the beginning of the 19th century onwards. The actual rise of the construction, however, takes place at the beginning of the following century, even though the intensifier this is usually found to lag behind its counterpart that, both in terms of occurrence and collocational use. The present paper investigates the use and distribution of the intensifying function of this/that in American English with the following objectives: (a) to trace their origin and grammaticalization as degree words in English; (b) to evaluate their quantitative dimension from a historical perspective; and (c) to assess their distribution across speech, writing and text types; and (d) to cast light on the lexico-semantic structure of the right-hand collocates in terms of their mode of construal. The source of evidence comes from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).