RT Conference Proceedings
T1 "'It is not exactly that bad': on the use of the intensifiers this and that in english
A1 Calle-Martín, Javier
K1 Lingüística - Congresos
AB The intensifying function of the adverbs this and that can be traced backto the 14th century, when they just appeared in combination with gradablescalar adjectives like big ¿ small, good ¿ bad, easy ¿ difficult, etc. The20th century has witnessed the rapid diffusion of these intensifiers, butnot only in terms of occurrence (both in speech and writing) but also interms of scope, accepting the other types of gradable adjectives, bothlimit and extreme adjectives (i.e. dead ) together with non-gradableadjectives (Paradis 2001: 50-53; 2008: 1317-318).The present study investigates the use and distribution of these degreemodifiers in present-day English with the following objectives: (a) totrace the development of these intensifiers; (b) to analyse the frequencyof the construction from a variationist perspective; (c) to cast light onthe lexical semantic structure of the right-hand collocates in terms oftheir mode of construal and their attitudinal features; and (d) todescribe their developmental path. The source of evidence for this studycomes from the tagged version of the British National Corpus developed byMark Davis (BNC-BYU).
YR 2015
FD 2015-11-13
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10630/10684
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10630/10684
LA eng
NO Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 20 ene 2026