Out of the spatial domain ‘Out’-intensifiers in the history of English
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Belén Méndez-Naya
Abstract
The article discusses a set of English intensifying adverbs which originate in the spatial domain and share the basic meaning ‘out’: outly, throughout(ly), twert-out, outright and utterly. Most of them developed degree readings in the Middle English period. The semantic associations of the meaning ‘out’, issuing from the container schema (boundedness and negative evaluation), determine the nature and distribution of ‘out’-intensifiers as maximizers with negative semantic prosodies. Syntactically, the adverbs evolve from spatial adjuncts to degree adjuncts and finally to degree modifiers of adjectives, adverbs, and other heads. Their development is viewed as a case of grammaticalization, displaying typical characteristics such as acquisition of more abstract meanings (spatial > degree), persistence, the workings of pragmatic inferencing, subjectification, scope reduction and renewal within the paradigm of maximizers.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Graphophonology and anachronic phonology Notes on episodes in the history of pseudo-phonology
- The voicing of intervocalic stops in Old Tuscan and probabilistic sound change
- On saying two things at once The historical semantics and pragmatics of Old English emotion words
- Third-person singular zero in the Norfolk dialect A re-assessment
- Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns
- On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative
- Out of the spatial domain ‘Out’-intensifiers in the history of English
- On the syntax and semantics of the past perfect participle and gerundive in early New Indo Arian Evidence from Eastern Pahari
- The correlation between motion event encoding and path verb lexicon size in the Indo-European language family
- Book Reviews
