Tuesday, November 27th @3:30 PM, Harper 130

From “tall-issimo” to “game-issimo”: Subjectification and intensification in diachrony

Abstract:

Intensifiers are universally considered to be a productive field for investigating semantic change. However, diachronic work on such expressions mostly focuses on shifts from lexical words to functional ones (e.g., really/very) and treats intensification as a final stage of grammaticalization (Partington 1993, Lorenz 2002). Little has been said, however, on diachronic trajectories within the category of intensifiers, especially those involving words/morphemes that have never had an independent lexical meaning. We propose to fill this gap by discussing the diachrony of the suffixal intensifier  –issimo in Italian. In contemporary Italian -issimo has three distinct functions: (1) degree-modification, (2) slack-regulation, and (3) nominal intensification. Relying on evidence from written diachronic corpora, we show that Antique Latin only has the degree-modification usage, while Old Italian innovated the slack-regulation usage, and nominal intensification is exclusive to contemporary Italian. We argue that this diachronic pathway reflects a loss of truth-conditional meaning and a shift from the propositional content to speaker’s content. While it would be tempting to analyze this trajectory as a case of subjectification in Traugott’s (2003) sense, we suggest that the emergence of the new meanings of –issimo are better charaterized as the result of an independent re-analysis process. We follow Eckardt (2009) in proposing that such a process is triggered by the need to obviate the pragmatic disruption that is generated whenever the suffix is used in an innovative way.  Within this view, subjectification is no longer seen as a driving force of linguistic change, but as a consequence of the new, less constrained meanings recruited via re-analysis.

 

(1) In altissimam turrem ascendit animo (100a.D.,LatinLibraryText)

He climbed the tall-issimo (extremely tall) tower courageously.

 

(2) Nella apoplessía arrivare alla sanità è cosa impossibilissima (1300,www.lessicografia.it)

In apoplexy, healing is impossible-issimo (truly/absolutely impossible)

 

(3) E’la partitissima,la sfida cruciale come nel settimo incontro del baseball (1987, LaRepubblica)

It’s the game-issimo (huge/important/crucial/rivalry/exciting/…game), like the World

Series’ game 7.