Morphological and syntactic adjective intensification in L2 Italian and German in a multilingual context

1 Intensification in evaluative morphology

Evaluative morphology encompasses the range of morphological processes – including derivation, compounding, reduplication etc. – allowing language users to express subjective judgements or evaluations (Grandi and Körtvélyessy 2015). These judgements may involve different properties like size, quantity, quality, intensity or deviation from some form of prototype. In this paper, we consider the evaluative property of intensity: the semantic and pragmatic increase of the degree or force of the meaning conveyed by a linguistic form. Intensification is strictly connected with “the expression of degree and, then, with the notions of gradability and scale” (Napoli and Ravetto 2017: 1). It follows that an intensifier can be identified as “any device that scales a quality […] by establishing different degrees of that quality” (Bolinger 1972: 17). By grading the degree of a given meaning, speakers may also express their subjective judgement or emotional involvement, and they may do so using morphological means. Given this “achieving of subjectivity” (Athanasiadou 2007: 555), intensification represents one of the possible instantiations of evaluative morphology (Grandi 2017).

Although intensification may affect different parts of speech (e.g., adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs), we specifically focus on adjectives, which are by their nature gradable elements, and we consider intensification as the upward evaluative scaling from the assumed quality expressed by an adjective. Adjective intensification has already been investigated within the framework of evaluative morphology: the focus has been placed for instance on the morphopragmatic properties expressed by the evaluative morphological devices of intensifiers (Dressler and Barbaresi 1994), and on the formal strategies used to perform the semantic operation of intensifying that may lead to the establishment of an intensification cline (Grandi 2017).

This research on adjective intensification as an instantiation of evaluative morphology has found so far little application in language acquisition, particularly in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Our aim is therefore to fill this gap and to investigate the acquisition of the intensified adjective construction in Italian and German as second languages (L2s). L2 Italian and German were chosen for two main reasons: they are typologically different languages, and therefore they may display different acquisitional mechanisms as target languages; most importantly, both languages use morphological and syntactic means to express intensification. As a result, a comparative analysis of the acquisition of adjective intensification in Italian and German allows us to investigate the ways in which different morphological devices interact and compete with each other or with syntactic intensification devices in the language used by learners of these languages. In addition, Italian and German were chosen to be investigated in the multilingual region of South Tyrol: an environment where the two languages are learned at school with similar purposes and in comparable contexts, which is therefore particularly suited to analysing their specific acquisitional mechanisms, as well as the possible reciprocal interactions between the two languages. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate the intensified adjective construction in written productions of young learners of Italian and German from the multilingual region of South Tyrol.

The paper is organised as follows: Section 2 summarises the morphological and syntactic means to express adjective intensification in Italian and German; Section 3 is a concise review of previous research on intensification in SLA; Section 4 describes Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG), the theoretical framework used to investigate the acquisitional processes in multilingual environments; Section 5 introduces the research questions and hypotheses; Section 6 presents the data, and the method of the study and Section 7 the results. We will conclude this contribution with a discussion of our findings in Section 8.

2 Adjective intensification in Italian and German between morphology and syntax

The intensified adjective construction can be described by the following formal representation: [[X]_INT [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ/AP ‘very Y’. According to this representation, any kind of intensifier modifies an adjective resulting in an adjective, in the case of a morphological intensification, or in an adjective phrase, if the intensifier is composed of one or more words, as in the case of the syntactic intensification. This formal and abstract representation applies to Italian and German, since both languages use at an abstract level morphological and syntactic intensification. At a less schematic and abstract level, Italian and German still share some constructions, while others are specific to each of the two languages (Spina et al. 2025: 280–286). Italian exhibits two morphological (illustrated in examples 1a–b) and five syntactic constructions (1c–g) while German possesses two morphological (2a–b) and three syntactic constructions (2c–e).

Table 1 contrasts the Italian and German constructions. Italian and German share one morphological (the intensifying prefix construction [1a/2a]) and three syntactic constructions (the intensifying adverb construction [1c/2c]), the prototypical comparison construction [1d/2d]), the hyperbolic intensifying prepositional construction [1e/2e]). While Italian has three constructions that are not used in German, i.e. the morphological superlative suffix construction (1b) and the syntactic conventional intensifying adjective (1f) and the reduplication construction (1g), German uses as one further morphological device the intensified adjective compound construction (2b).

Speakers and learners of Italian and German thus can rely partly on common and partly on different morphological and syntactic means to intensify the qualities expressed by adjectives. Hypotheses on how these different means coexist and are selected and used by learners, particularly in multilingual contexts, will be explored in Section 4. What is important to stress here is that these different forms of the same function can compete and specialise in distinct uses, depending on the contexts, registers, adjectives being intensified, and, in the case of learners, also depending on acquisitional factors such as their proficiency level.

3 Intensification in SLA

Previous research on the acquisition of adjective intensification in pre-university L2 learners has mainly investigated L2 English (e.g., Edmonds and Gudmestad 2014; Hasselgård 2022; Lorenz 1999; Lovrović and Pintarić 2019; Pérez-Paredes and Díez-Bedmar 2012; Schweinberger 2020; Recski 2004), but also other second languages including Dutch (Hendrikx et al. 2019; Van Goethem and Hendrikx 2021), Spanish (Czerwionka and Olson 2020), German (Wirtz 2025) and Italian (Spina et al. 2025). The main result of this vast body of research is that learners, especially beginners, tend to generalise the use of the intensifying adverb construction and to overuse all-purpose intensifiers such as the English adverb very, the Dutch adverb heel and the Italian adverb molto. However, as learners’ proficiency levels increase, particularly learners with stronger exposure to the target language tend to produce intensifying constructions in a more target-like manner: that is, by overusing less the prototypical intensifying adverb construction, and by resorting to a greater extent to alternative constructions available in the target languages (Van Goethem and Hendrikx 2021).

Research on learners of L2 Italian support these results: 757 teenagers (average age of 17) learning Italian as an L2 in schools from South Tyrol at a proficiency level ranging from beginner to advanced investigated in Spina et al. (2025) were able to use four Italian adjective intensifying constructions out of the seven listed in Table 1, namely (1a–d), but did not use the hyperbolic intensifying prepositional construction (1e), the conventional intensifying adjective construction (1f) and the reduplication construction (1g), of which the latter two do not exist in German. Moreover, learners used the different intensification types with a similar distribution as native speakers of Italian, with the prototypical intensifying adverb construction (1c) with molto ‘very’ being by far the most used both by learners and by native speakers. However, while beginners used almost exclusively prototypical forms of intensification (81 % of all intensification types), an increase in proficiency, starting with level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR; Council of Europe 2020), led to a more diversified use of intensifying constructions. B1 was the first level where the use of maximisers appeared and where learners resorted more often to the superlative suffix construction (22.95 % of all intensification types for B1 learners, against 13.79 for beginners) (Spina et al. 2025: 299).

Spina et al. (2025) also investigated adjective intensification, comparing the use of morphological and syntactic constructions. The main finding is that in the context of South Tyrolean schools a dominant German-speaking language environment predicts the preference for a syntactic over a morphological intensification type. This preference is affected by the frequency of the intensified adjectives: the morphological constructions are more often used with frequent adjectives (Spina et al. 2025: 295). In addition, proficiency also has a significant effect on the use of morphological and syntactic types of intensification: the use of morphological intensifying constructions increases with a higher proficiency and seems to discriminate among intermediate (B1) and post-intermediate (B2) learners (Spina et al. 2025: 295–296). The study by Spina et al. (2025) thus shows how, in a multilingual environment such as South Tyrol, the choice of syntactic or morphological intensification types, as well as the use of specific types of intensification, are influenced by several factors, including the learners’ L1s and their proficiency levels, and the frequency of intensified adjectives. However, this picture needs to be complemented with the other side of the same multilingual environment, the one in which Italian teenagers learn German as an L2 at school, to look for analogies and differences in the way learners organise the different linguistic means at their disposal to intensify adjectives.

4 The DCxG approach

A theory that can model second or any additional language acquisition is the emerging individual multilingualism approach, as introduced in Höder et al. (2021: 316) within the framework of the Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG, Höder 2012). Following the tradition of Construction Grammar (CxG), DCxG advocates a holistic approach and does not assume a discrete distinction between the grammar and the lexicon of a language, which are situated on a continuum. Instead, it describes constructions as the basic units in an individual’s mind that cover all linguistic levels. Constructions are defined as “conventional and learned form-function pairings” (Goldberg 2013: 17), which are linked to each other by interconstructional links. Thus, they form a network of constructions, i.e. a structured inventory of constructions called the constructicon. Within a constructicon, constructions differ with respect to their levels of schematicity: words, for instance, are lexically filled constructions, while an inflection paradigm is represented as a partly schematic construction. Conventional syntactic patterns are understood as maximally schematic (cf. Höder 2012: 247).

Moreover, DCxG presumes a single multilingual constructicon in which all linguistic knowledge of a person is stored. In a multilingual constructicon, many constructions, in particular at a schematic level, are shared across languages. Others, especially at the partly schematic and lexical levels, may be language-specific. The information on whether a construction is language-specific is part of the communicative and pragmatic context information and thus of the function of the construction (Höder et al. 2021: 313). Language-specific constructions are called idioconstructions, and unspecified constructions are termed diaconstructions. They are jointly stored in the constructicon. Based on the conventional constructions of Italian and German (Table 1), Figure 1 models the multilingual constructicon of the intensified adjective construction [[X]]_INT [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ/AP ‘very Y’ of a proficient bilingual speaker of both languages.

Figure 1:

A model of the multilingual constructicon of a German and Italian speaker displaying the intensifying adjective construction [[X]_INT [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ/AP ‘very Y’; ADV = adverb, AdvP = adverb phrase, ADJ = adjective, AP = adjective phrase, INT = intensifier, N = noun, NP = noun phrase, PART = particle, PREF = prefix, SUFF = suffix, V = verb, V_inf = infinite verb (adapted from Spina et al. 2025: 287).

Italian and German share several constructions, which are thus considered diaconstructions at a schematic level. The superlative prefix construction [[X]_PREF [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ (1a/2a) and the intensifying adverb construction [[X]_AdvP [Y]_ADJ]_AP (1c/2c) exist in both languages and, from the perspective of the bilingual speaker, they can be applied to both pragmatic contexts of language use. Additionally, the prototypical comparison construction [[Y]_ADJ PART [X]_NP]_AP, (1d/2d) and the hyperbolic intensifying prepositional construction [[Y]_ADJ PREP [X]_Vinf]_AP, (1e/2e) are also diaconstructions at the schematic level and are linked to language-specific constructions at a partly schematic level.^[1] Other constructions are language-specific and not linked to a common diaconstruction at a higher level of schematicity. Idioconstructions of Italian include the superlative suffix construction [[Y]_ADJ [X]_SUFF]_ADJ (1b), the conventional intensifying adjective construction [[Y]_ADJ [X]_ADJ]_AP (1f) and the reduplication construction [[Y]_ADJ [X = Y]_ADJ]_AP (1g). One construction type, the intensified adjective compound construction [[X]_N/V/ADJ/ADV [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ is specific to German (2b). It is worth noting that the multilingual constructicon (cf. Figure 1) contains both morphological ([[X]_INT [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ) and syntactic ([[X]_INT [Y]_ADJ]_AP) intensification types (cf. Section 2) as they are all constructions of the same superconstruction [[X]_INT [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ/AP (Van Goethem and Hendrikx 2021: 385).

An important feature of the emerging individual multilingualism approach is Höder et al.’s (2021: 316) focus on constructions as “learned form-function pairings in the learner’s emerging multilingual constructicon” regardless of whether they are conventional for a speaker community (cf. Höder 2012; 2018). This definition enables the description of learners’ interlanguage varieties within the DCxG framework. In the process of learning a language, learners receive different kinds and quantities of input from the language they want to learn, which constantly changes the structure of their emerging multilingual constructicon. During this learning process, learner-specific constructions that differ from conventional constructions of a target language (e.g. learner errors) may be part of a person’s multilingual constructicon and revised at a later point in time. A concept widely accepted in usage-based theories and crucial for the description of language learning in DCxG is the notion of entrenchment (Höder et al. 2021: 321–324). The authors explicitly refer to Schmid’s (2017) work and describe entrenchment as a gradual concept that refers to the cognitive dimension of the strength of the association between a form and a function (Höder et al. 2021: 322), and the links between form-function pairings (Höder et al. 2021: 324) represented in a speaker’s mind. Constructions may therefore differ in terms of their degree of entrenchment. Newly heard and less common or frequent constructions might be less entrenched in the constructicon than previously learned and often used constructions. However, the status of entrenchment can vary over time and some erroneous constructions that are part of the learners’ interlanguage varieties may be stored temporarily in the multilingual constructicon and disentrenched later when the learners have received enough negative evidence from the input.

According to Höder et al. 2021 (326–327), the reorganization of the multilingual constructicon during the acquisition of any additional language is primarily lead by three directions:

1. the addition of constructions as a result of the received language input from the additional language,

2. the establishment of interconstructional links, and

3. a reshaping of constructional properties (e.g. information about language-specific usage will be added to existing ones once the speaker has enough evidence that it can only be used for one language).

With regard to the intensifying adjective construction [[X]_INT [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ/AP ‘very Y’, becoming multilingual means for a German speaker who additionally learns Italian to add five new intensifying adjective constructions to the constructicon, in particular the partly schematic Italian prototypical comparison construction [[Y]_ADJ come [X]_NP]_AP (1d) and the hyperbolic intensifying prepositional construction [[Y]_ADJ da [X]_Vinf]_AP (1e) as well as the schematic superlative suffix construction [[Y]_ADJ [X]_SUFF]_ADJ (1b), the conventional intensifying adjective construction [[Y]_ADJ [X]_ADJ]_AP (1f) and the reduplication construction [[Y]_ADJ [X = Y]_ADJ]_AP (1g). By adding these constructions, new links will be established among the newly added and existing constructions reshaping the properties of existing constructions. For instance, language-specific pragmatic information will be added to previously pragmatically unspecified constructions. New schematic diaconstructions are created for the prototypical comparison construction ([[Y]_ADJ PART [X]_NP]_AP) and the hyperbolic intensifying prepositional construction ([[Y]_ADJ PREP [X]_Vinf]_AP), which link the language-specific partly schematic constructions exemplified in (1d/2d) and (1e/2e). The intensifying adverb construction [[X]_AdvP [Y]_ADJ]_AP (1c) and the superlative prefix construction [[X]_PREF [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ (1a) already exist as intensifying constructions in a German speaker’s mind. Thus, newly heard lexically filled constructions of these types will be linked to them.

An Italian speaker who learns German, on the other hand, has to add the partly schematic German prototypical comparison construction [(so) [Y]_ADJ wie [X]_NP]_AP (2d), the hyperbolic intensifying prepositional construction [zum [X]_Vinf [Y]_ADJ]_AP (2e) and the schematic intensified adjective compound construction [[X]_N/V/ADJ/ADV [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ. Again, new interconstructional links will be established, and the constructicon will be reshaped. The pragmatic information of language-specific context of use (<C_Italian>) is added to most existing constructions. Only the intensifying adverb construction [[X]_AdvP [Y]_ADJ]_AP (2c) and the superlative prefix construction [[X]_PREF [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ (2a) are not language-specific and will serve as diaconstructions. The diaconstructions of the prototypical comparison construction [[Y]_ADJ PART [X]_NP]_AP (2d) and the hyperbolic intensifying prepositional construction [[Y]_ADJ PREP [X]_Vinf]_AP (2e) are created and respectively linked to the language-specific constructions.

From a DCxG perspective, learning Italian intensifying adjective constructions for a German speaker seems to be more demanding than learning German intensifying adjective constructions for an Italian speaker, as Italian has a higher variety of unknown constructions for a German speaker than the other way around. However, there are some constructions in both languages that are very similar and should thus be easily learned in either direction.

5 Research questions and hypotheses

Let us now turn to the main research interest of this paper, which is twofold. From a developmental perspective, we are interested in how intensifying adjective constructions are learned when the known language and the language to be learned differ in the way they conventionally express the intensification of adjectives. Spina et al. (2025) have detailed which constructions are used and preferred by German-speaking learners of Italian from the multilingual Italian region of South Tyrol. In this article, we are interested in which constructions are used by Italian-speaking learners of German from the same multilingual area to express intensification with German adjectives. Moreover, we are interested in comparing both groups of learners to understand if differences occur given the commonalities and differences between Italian and German. With respect to the topic of this special issue, we are also interested in aspects of evaluative morphology. Again, the two languages Italian and German feature commonalities and differences regarding construction patterns and preferences of use. Our first research question thus is:

RQ 1: Are there any differences in the relationship between morphological and syntactic intensification used by young learners of L2 Italian and L2 German from the multilingual Italian region of South Tyrol?

As illustrated in Section 4, building the multilingual Italian-German constructicon for the intensifying adjective construction during the process of language learning varies with the L1 as a starting point. For a German-speaking learner of Italian there are more language-specific constructions to learn than for an Italian-speaking learner of German. The differences for language learning also relate to the elements used for each construction, be it morphologically bound or unbound elements. Morphological intensification is expected to be challenging for both learner groups as there are idioconstructions at the schematic level for both languages. To learn the full array of syntactic intensification is expected to be more challenging for German-speaking learners of Italian as there are more idioconstructions of Italian in the conventional multilingual constructicon (Figure 1).

Additionally, constructions of the L1 and of the L2 may compete, particularly when preferences of usage for certain types of constructions differ between the two languages (Section 2). To understand which intensifying adjective constructions are used by L2 learners of Italian and German who use the other language as L1, we will also investigate the way in which the reorganization of the constructicon is being processed. Our second research question thus is:

RQ 2: How are competing constructions at different levels reorganised during the acquisitional process?

As diaconstructions are usually easier to learn than idioconstructions, we expect learners to use diaconstructions more likely and more often. However, drawing on a usage-based framework, learning also depends on the frequency of words and constructions, i.e. how often they are used in the language to be learned. Therefore, we expect an impact of frequency on the occurrence of intensifying adjective constructions in the multilingual constructicon.

6 Data and method

The Kolipsi Corpus Family (Glaznieks et al. 2023) contains learner texts of German and Italian L2 speakers originating from public upper secondary schools in the multilingual Italian Autonomous Province of South Tyrol (Abel et al. 2012; Vettori and Abel 2017). In South Tyrol, Italian and German are recognised as official languages and school education is offered in both languages throughout the province, organised by different schoolboards that are responsible for education in the respective languages (Abel et al. 2010).^[2] The German L2 data of the Kolipsi Corpus Family was collected in schools with Italian as language of instruction, in which German is taught as L2 as a subject on a daily basis, while the Italian L2 data was collected in schools with German as language of instruction, in which Italian is daily taught as L2 subject.

The Kolipsi corpora comprise learner texts derived from standardised tasks designed to assess L2 competencies. A total of 1,000 learners contributed to the Kolipsi-1 corpus for the L2 Italian section, each producing two texts corresponding to the narrative and argumentative tasks, resulting in an aggregate of 387,000 tokens. To investigate the L2 German data, we accumulated data from Kolipsi-1 and Kolipsi-2 as the L2 German part of Kolipis-1 is too small to compare with the L2 Italian part. In total, 624 learners have provided two texts each (narrative and argumentative) amounting to a total number of 193,000 tokens for L2 German. Both corpora are comparable with respect to writer age and task genre. The tasks for the Kolipsi-1 corpus included: (1) composing an e-mail to a friend recounting a specified event at the supermarket (narrative text genre), and (2) writing a letter to a friend discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various holiday destinations (argumentative text genre). For the Kolipsi-2 corpus, the topic of the narrative text genre remained the same, but the topic of the argumentative text was modernised; the students were asked to discuss advantages and disadvantages of social-media use. Table 2 gives an overview of the two corpora.

The corpora are enriched with diverse metadata, such as school type, gender, linguistic environment, socioeconomic status, L2 proficiency, and the learners’ and their parents’ L1s (Glaznieks et al. 2023: 68–71). For this study, learners’ proficiency levels and language environments are particularly relevant (Table 3). The proficiency levels specified in the metadata of both corpora refer to the scales of the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe 2020). As there were few A1 and C2 learners overall in the two corpora, the two beginner and the two advanced levels were merged in an A and a C level respectively, resulting in the four proficiency levels described in Table 3. As for learners’ language environments, Kolipsi metadata provide information on the L1s of their mothers and fathers and on the dominant language group in the geographical areas they live in. Again, we merged these metadata into the binary category language environment with the two possible values dominant (if mother L1, father L1 and linguistic context are the same) and mixed (if the three metadata vary).

Based on these data, we used a generalised mixed-effect model to answer RQ 1 (Are there any differences in the relationship between morphological and syntactic intensification used by young learners of L2 Italian and L2 German from the multilingual Italian region of South Tyrol?). Our aim was to investigate the possible effects of linguistic and extralinguistic factors on the categorical variable of intensification type (syntactic or morphological). We built two symmetrical models with L2 Italian and L2 German data using R (Version 4.2.2; R Core Team 2022) and the R package lme4 (Version 1.1–31; Bates et al. 2015), including the following four independent variables (Table 4):

1. L1, a categorical variable based on the Kolipsi corpora metadata: for L2 Italian, German (N = 1,662), German-Italian (N = 188), Ladin (N = 39); for L2 German, Italian (N = 821), German-Italian (N = 92), Ladin (N = 27), other (N = 58);

2. language environment, a categorical variable with the two values dominant and mixed (see Table 3);

3. proficiency level, an ordinal variable with the four levels A, B1, B2 and C (see Table 3);

4. log-transformed adjective frequency, obtained from two reference corpora of Italian (the Perugia corpus, Spina 2014) and of German (DeReKo 2023-I, Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache 2023). Log-transformed values were used as more suitable for skewed frequency data (Winter 2020). For L2 Italian: range = 2.3–15.3; mean = 11.7; SD = 1.3; for L2 German: range = 5.5–22.7; mean = 18.8; SD = 2.4.

Our hypothesis was that proficiency, L1 and the most widely used language in learners’ living environments would affect the choice of a syntactic or morphological intensification type, overall favouring diaconstructions over idioconstructions. As we relied on a usage-based and constructionist approach, we also hypothesised that exposure plays a crucial role in the way adjective intensification is acquired and used, and we relied on two reference corpora for Italian and German as resources able to represent the input to which a learner is exposed.

As for random effects, we modelled individual differences in the use of intensification and possible teaching style effects by nesting the learner variable into the class variable, and possible variation in intensification use as a function of task type by including task as a random effect. Under these premises, we selected the best models by adopting a top-down approach (Gries 2021) and we explored the model structure starting with models that contained the maximum number of fixed effects and interactions. In this process, we used Anova tests and the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), indicating the amount of variance left unexplained by the model (Cunnings 2012), in order to compare pairs of models and to find the best fit. Although log-transformed adjective frequency, the numerical independent variable, is not normally distributed, the diagnostics of simulated residuals indicate that the models fit the data well: the residuals are uniformly distributed, with no significant signs of overdispersion, outliers, or systematic deviations, indicating no substantial issues with model specification. We also checked the model for multicollinearity using Variance Inflation Factors (VIF), which again revealed no issues in model specification.

To answer RQ 2 (How are competing constructions at different levels reorganised during the acquisitional process?), we looked at the intensified adjective construction at a less abstract level, investigating the different adjectives that are used with the competing morphological and syntactic constructions, with the aim of detecting patterns in this use.

7 Results

The 1,889 instances of adjective intensification produced by learners of L2 Italian (Table 4) cover four out of the seven Italian intensification types, while the 998 occurrences detected in the L2 German data cover four out of five German intensification types (Table 1). Young learners of L2 Italian and German from South Tyrol, thus, are able to productively use at least some of the resources available in the target languages to intensify adjectives, and they do so systematically, given that in the texts they produce in the two L2s the number of intensified adjectives range from 1 to 12.

However, descriptive statistics shows that the way these different resources are distributed over syntactic and morphological means is different across the two L2s. Figure 2 shows that in both L2 Italian and German there is a clear prevalence of syntactic constructions, and particularly of the intensifying adverb construction, which in L2 Italian accounts for 75.4 % of all the adjective intensifications, and in L2 German covers even 94.4 % of the total number of intensified constructions. In addition to that, the data indicate that in L2 Italian a morphological construction somehow balances the prevalence of the syntactic one: the morphological superlative suffix construction [[Y]_ADJ [X]_SUFF]_ADJ ending in –issimo (e.g. pienissimo ‘very full’) accounts for 24.1 % of all the intensified adjectives. This morphological construction has no such broadly used equivalent in L2 German, where the morphological intensified adjective compound construction [[X]_N/V/ADJ/ADV [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ (e.g. knallvoll ‘very full’) is only used occasionally (5.4 %) by L2 German learners.

Figure 2:

The distribution of syntactic and morphological adjective intensification in L2 Italian and German data from the Kolipsi corpora.

The generalised mixed-effect models explain how this difference is affected by the selected predictors. With the L2 Italian data, which had already been analysed in Spina et al. (2025: 295–296), three predictors were found to have significant effects on intensification type (morphological or syntactic; see Appendix 1), with no interaction between any of them: language environment, CEFR level and log-transformed adjective frequency. The plot in Figure 3 shows that a dominant German-speaking linguistic environment is a significant predictor of the preference for a syntactic over a morphological intensification type, compared to a mixed linguistic environment, which is the reference level. Additionally, the morphological –issimo superlative construction is predicted by high frequency adjectives, and by more advanced proficiency levels starting from B2, compared to CEFR level A, which is in turn the reference level. Alongside the generalised use of the syntactic intensifying adverb construction, therefore, learners of Italian who have reached a post-intermediate proficiency level (B2) also use the superlative suffix construction, particularly with frequent adjectives. The model’s total explanatory power is substantial (conditional R2 = 0.61) and the part related to the fixed effects alone (marginal R2) is 0.49.

Figure 3:

The effects of language environment, CEFR level and adjective frequency on the use of morphological and syntactic adjective intensification by learners of L2 Italian in the Kolipsi-1 corpus (adapted from Spina et al. 2025: 296). Reference levels: morphological intensification, CEFR level = A, language environment = mixed.

Turning to the data of L2 German, only two predictors in the generalised mixed-effect model were found to have significant effects on intensification type (see Appendix 2), with no interaction between any of them: CEFR level and log-transformed adjective frequency. As shown in Figure 4, learners of L2 German seem to prefer intensifying adverb syntactic construction regardless of their linguistic environment. The few morphological compound constructions are used only occasionally by intermediate and advanced learners with more frequent adjectives, as in L2 Italian. The model’s total explanatory power is substantial (conditional R2 = 0.44) and the part related to the fixed effects alone (marginal R2) is 0.16.

Figure 4:

The effects of CEFR level and adjective frequency on the use of morphological and syntactic adjective intensification by learners of L2 German in the Kolipsi-1+2 corpora. Reference levels: morphological intensification, CEFR level = A, language environment = mixed.

To answer RQ 1, the results of the mixed-effect models suggest that, while learners of L2 Italian and German have the same option to choose between competing morphological and syntactic intensifying constructions, only upper intermediate and advanced learners of L2 Italian from a mixed linguistic environment exploit this opportunity and alternate the two types of constructions, where the morphological –issimo construction is an Italian idioconstruction for German learners. Hence, German learners show clear restructuring of their constructicon by adopting the new idioconstruction, a pattern not seen among Italian learners of L2 German in the Kolipsi-1+2 corpora.

In this competition between the two construction types, what is the advantage for German learners of using an Italian idioconstruction? Moving down to a less abstract level, we looked at the different Italian adjectives intensified by German learners with the suffix –issimo. The morphological construction in –issimo is used many times with very few frequent adjectives: bello ‘beautiful’ alone occurs 306 times as bellissimo ‘very beautiful’, and if we sum up the three most frequent adjectives intensified with –issimo (bello ‘beautiful’, buono ‘good’, grande ‘big’), we find that they cover 84 % of all the –issimo instances (Figure 5).

Figure 5:

Frequency of adjectives intensified with the morphological superlative suffix construction [[Y]_ADJ [X]_SUFF]_ADJ ‘very Y’ in the Kolipsi-1 corpus (L2 Italian).

What can be observed with a closer look into the corpus data is thus that the morphological superlative suffix construction ending in –issimo in L2 Italian forms intensified adjectives which are highly conventional, as in the case of bellissimo ‘very beautiful’, which is even almost stereotypical. In Example (3), a German learner of Italian adds another superlative form (il … più ‘the most’) to the superlative bellissimo, which is not correct in Italian, as if he or she does not perceive bellissimo as an intensified form but only as a conventional way of expressing the meaning of ‘beautiful’ and therefore needs to intensify bello again.

If we compare this data with those of the syntactic intensification with molto ‘very’, we can observe conversely that molto is combined with a much wider set of less frequent adjectives, many of which occur just once or twice, without forming conventional constructions (Figure 6). The three most frequent adjectives intensified with molto (bello ‘beautiful’, arrabbiato ‘angry’, contento ‘happy’), taken together, cover only 37 % of all the occurrences of the adjectives intensified with molto.

Figure 6:

Frequency of adjectives intensified with the molto in the syntactic intensifying adverb construction [[X]_AdvP [Y] _ADJ]_AP ‘very Y’ in the Kolipsi-1 corpus (L2 Italian).

8 Discussion and concluding remarks

The findings of the study on adjective intensification in L2 German complement a previous study on L2 Italian (Spina et al. 2025). As the data from both studies come from the multilingual province of South Tyrol, where both Italian and German are learned and used by all students on a daily basis, this study provides the opportunity to look at the DCxG approach from complementary perspectives: how German compared to Italian speakers create the multilingual constructicon for the intensified adjective construction [[X]_INT [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ/AP ‘very Y’. Within this framework, it contributes to research in evaluative morphology with a perspective on L2 learners and how they express intensification morphologically and with competing syntactic constructions.

The results of this study confirmed the tendencies of Spina et al.’s (2025) study. The analysis showed that the frequencies of the intensified adjectives and the proficiencies of the speakers are the main predictors for the use of a morphological intensification type in German L2; the more frequent an adjective is or the more proficient the learners are (without any interaction between both variables), the higher the probability of the use of morphological intensification in L2 German. However, in contrast to the previous study, no overuse of morphological intensification could be detected in the present study. A reason for this difference might be the diverse status of morphological intensification types in Italian and German (Maloggi 2017: 259–260). Both languages share the superlative prefix construction [[X]_PREF [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ (1a/2a) but this type is rarely used in the corpus data, which might be due to register awareness of the writers as it is mainly used in spoken and colloquial language in German (Calpestrati 2017). The highly productive Italian superlative suffix construction [[Y]_ADJ [X]_SUFF]_ADJ (1b) is very salient and frequently used, while the German intensified adjective compound construction [[X]_N/V/ADJ/ADV [Y]_ADJ]_ADJ (2b) is less productive and requires knowledge of conventional combinations of intensifier and adjective. It is therefore no surprise that the most frequent compound in the data is wunderschön ‘very nice’, which takes up 85 % of this construction type and is itself a high frequent compound in German. It thus might have been entrenched in the multilingual constructicon first. This is comparable to the L2 Italian data, in which the intensified adjectives bellissimo ‘very beautiful’, buonissimo ‘very good’ and grandissimo ‘very big’ take up 84 % of all superlative suffix constructions. In that way, the German data on intensified adjectives also confirm the impression that the network of constructions is built up by high-frequent and lexically filled low-level constructions as well as by schematic high-level cross-linguistic similarities (Jach 2021: 340).

High level cross-linguistic similarities are most often used by both L2 German and Italian learners in our data and compete with the morphological constructions as the most frequent diaconstruction is a syntactic construction, namely the intensifying adverb construction [[X]_AdvP [Y]_ADJ]_AP (1c/2c). As a diaconstruction in a German-Italian constructicon it should be learned easily by L2 German and Italian learners. This hypothesis was confirmed by our data as it is the most frequent construction type at large with sehr ‘very’ as the default adverb used by L2 learners of German and molto ‘very’ as the default adverb used by L2 learners of Italian. Moreover, the range of adjectives used with this type of intensification in both learner groups is high, which underlines the assumption that the construction has been taken up at a high schematic level and can be lexically filled with a variety of intensifiers and adjectives.

Taking a bird’s-eye perspective on the two corpora compared in this study, we can observe a “division of labour” between high frequent morphological and syntactic intensification constructions. In the L2 Italian data, morphological constructions, in particular the superlative suffix construction, are predominantly repetitions of common and conventional forms which are available in the input, while syntactic constructions, in particular the intensifying adverb construction, are used in a productive way as they can be combined with almost any adjective. The same division is less obvious in the L2 German data as the morphological constructions are generally rare. However, the few instances of the intensified adjective compound construction, mainly wunderschön ‘very beautiful’ in our data, can also be interpreted as a repetition of a highly conventional form while the syntactic intensifying adverb construction is used in a more productive way by Italian students. For both learner groups, the intensifying adverb construction is the most attractive construction because, as a diaconstruction, it is highly familiar to all students and can be transferred from the respective L1 (cf. Wirtz 2025: 16–18).