Cagliari, Italy  15-18 September 2003

ALT V Conference

Ekkehard König & Volker Gast

Towards a typology of intensifiers
koenig@zedat.fu-berlin.de

Intensifiers, i.e. expressions like Latin ipse, Russian sam, Italian stesso, Mandarin ziji or English X-self and own, are more easily identifiable on the basis of  the fact that they are invariably focused and stressed than on the basis of a specific lexical category or a specific syntactic behaviour. In fact their syntactic behaviour suggests that they either have to be assigned to several lexical categories or to a category of their own. There are at least four different uses of intensifiers, not all of which are found in every language: (a) an adnominal one (the director himself), (b) an adverbial exclusive use (He will do it himself), (c) an adverbial inclusive use (I am a little puzzled myself) and (d) an attributive one (I will take my own car). During the last ten years or so the syntactic and semantic properties of intensifiers have been studied extensively, both in individual languages and across languages, so that it seems possible to take stock of the results of these studies and to present a coherent picture both of the properties observable in all languages and of the parameters of variation found across languages in this domain.

            Intensifiers typically develop from expressions for central body parts and play an important role in the development, reinforcement and renovation of reflexive anaphors. Semantically, they can be analysed as expressing the identity function which can be applied to various constituents of a proposition. Given that the contribution they make to the meaning of a sentence is thus trivial, they are invariably focused (hence the term ‘emphatics’) and it is the alternatives evoked by this focussing which make up their characteristic contribution to the meaning of an utterance. After providing a brief analysis of their meaning, our paper will concentrate on the parameters of variation found across languages with regard to the form, syntax and use of intensifiers:

(a)   agreement vs. invariance

Intensifiers may agree with their co-constituent to the left (cf. (1)) or simply be invariant particles (cf. (2)).

(b)   relationship to reflexive anaphors

Intensifiers are identical to reflexive anaphors (cf. (3)) or clearly differentiated from them (cf. (4)).

(c)    selectional restrictions

      Intensifiers may or may not exhibit selectional restrictions with regard to their co-constituent to the left (cf. (5) and (6)).

(d)   lexical differentiations

The same lexical element may or may not be used for the four uses distinguished above (cf. (7) and (8)).

(e) morpho-syntactic asymmetries

      Intensifiers may or may not exhibit various idiosyncrasies in specific syntactic or morphological environments (e.g. pronouns, case, etc.; cf. (9) and (10))

The typology presented is based on a sample of approximately 200 languages. The question of whether there are limits of variation (i.e. universals) will also figure prominently in our talk.

(1)       Arabic: nafs- inflects for person, number and case

            Al-mudīr-u     nafs-u-hu                  sayastaqbilunā.

            the-director    int-nom-3sg.poss   will.welcome.us

    ‘The director himself will welcome us.’

(2)       Albanian: vetё is invariant

            Ajo    vetё mё        tha.

     she    int    to.me    said

     ‘She herself told me about it.’

(3)       Pitjantjatjara: intensifiers and reflexives are identical (-nku)

            (a)        mama-nyanga-nku     iluringu.

                         father-dem-int          died

                         ‘The father himself died.

            (b)        mama-ngku-nku     ilantanu.

         father-erg-refl      killed

         ‘Father killed himself.’

(4)       Bulgarian: intensifiers and reflexives are differentiated (sam vs. se)

            (a)        Sam     direktor-at        šte     govori   s     nas.

                         int       director-def     fut   talks     to   us

                        ‘The director himself will talk to us.’

            (b)        Mija        se.

                          I.wash     refl

                         ‘I wash myself.’

(5)       Amele: no sortal restrictions on intensifiers

            jo         uqa-dodoc

            house    it-int

            ‘the house itself’

(6)       Turkish: intensifiers only with human head NPs

            (a)        müdür-ün          kendi-si

         director-gen     int-3sg.poss

         ‘the director himself’

            (b)        *ev-in            kendi-si

            house-gen     int-3sg.poss

            int.: ‘the house itself’

(7)       Bengali: the adnominal intensifier nije occurs in an attributive function

            Paul tar nije-r         paribar-er         biruddhe     bisvashatokota     koreche.

            Paul his int-gen     family-GEN      against        betrayal               did

            ‘Paul betrayed his own family’

(8)       Mitla Zapotec: there is a specialized adverbial intensifier ensilaani

            Juan biääd           ensilaani.

            Juan will.come     int(adv)

            ‘Juan will come himself.’

(9)       English (intensifier cannot adjoin to object NPs)

            *I like his brother, but I don’t like him himself.

(10)     Basque (1^st/2^nd person intensifier -eu-, 3rd person intensifier bera-)

            (a)        Aita      santua-k     bera-k    gurekin    hitzegino     du

                        father    holy-erg     int-erg   with.us     will.talk       aux

                        ‘The Pope himself will talk to us.’

            (b)        ni-k         n-eu-k              ikusi nuen

                        I-ERG     1SG-int-erg   saw   aux

                        ‘I saw it myself.’