LINGUIST List 5.205

Tue 22 Feb 1994

Sum: Degree words

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1. Luca Dini, sum: Degree words.

> For the purpose of a PhD Thesis I would like to collect references
> about degree words when used as VP modifiers. For instance:
>
> Otto much resents the new taxes
> ---
> The new dancers didn't impress us very much
> ---------
> The Lions didn't win much this year
> ----
> He accomplishes so little these day
> --------
> Gary swam a little while he was in Jamaica
> -------
> I rather suspected that he was lying
> -----
> (examples from Ernst(1984))
>
> I am interested in both syntactic and semantic literature.
> Thanks,
> Luca Dini

Here are the references I could collect: Thanks to everybody for the
collaboration.

 Luca Dini

H. B/"acklund: The collocation of adverbs of degree in English, Uppsala
University, 1970.
(corpusstudy, verbs only included in discussion about -quite- and
-rather-)
'
D. Bolinger: Degree words, Janua Linguarum, series maior 53, Mouton,
The Hague/Paris, 1972

E. Gary: Extent in English: a unified account of degree and quantity, Diss.
University of California, Los Angeles, 1979.
(semantic, title covers contents)

S. Greenbaum: Verb-Intensifier Collocations in English - an experimental
approach, Mouton, The Hague/Paris, 1970
(different experiments (completion, evaluation) to determine collocations
and preferred wordorder)

Kuiper, Koenraad (1982) Once more with feeling: modifier repetition as a
stylistic rule. Linguistics 20: 493-517.

Kuiper, Koenraad (1989) The modularity of grammar and phonetic stretching.
Linguistics 27: 1057-1069.

C. van Os: Aspekte der Intensivierung im Deutschen, G/"unther Narr Verlag,
T/"ubingen
(semantic approach , overview of 'all' the degree words in German, he spent
some pages on the possibilities of intensifying verbs.)

Hans Peters (1993) Die englischen Gradsadverbien. Tubingen: Gunter Narr.