Death-related Intensifiers in the History of English : Grammaticalisation and Related Phenomena

Abstract

An all-important question for humans, death is unsurprisingly used as a source of intensification in language, perhaps even cross-linguistically. This book explores the use of death for intensification purposes in English and aims to shed light on how certain forms from this semantic field came to be used with an intensifying function over time, specifically dead(ly), mortal(ly) and to death. The author provides a full account of the evolution of these intensifiers from their origins up to present-day English from the perspective of grammaticalisation and other concomitant phenomena. To this end, this corpus-based research resorts to evidence from historical dictionaries, diachronic corpora and electronic collections. The study conducted, unprecedented in the number of examples analysed, combines both a qualitative and a quantitative approach to provide the most comprehensive picture of the long diachrony of these intensifiers.