Intensifiers in Late Modern English

Claudia Claridge is Chair of English Linguistics, University of Augsburg, Germany. She specializes in historical discourse linguistics and (historical) pragmatics. She is the author of Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English (2000) and Hyperbole in English (2011). Ewa Jonsson is Senior Lecturer of English Linguistics at Mid Sweden University specializing in corpus linguistics, historical sociopragmatics, and multidimensional register studies. She has authored Conversational Writing (2015) and co-edited Voices Past and Present (2020). Merja Kytö is Senior Professor of English Language, Uppsala University, Sweden. She co-authored Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England (2011) and co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics (2016).

'This book is a gem. A remarkably rigorous and systematic treatment of intensifiers in Late Modern English (focussing on the Old Bailey Corpus), it travels the whole gamut of pragmatics, from the more formal to the more social, and lights the way for future such studies, whether historical or present-day.' Jonathan Culpeper, Professor of English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University

• 1. Introduction: pleading the case; 2. Theoretical and methodological considerations; 3. Intensifiers: forms, features, and functions; 4. Corpus methodology and overview of data; 5. Maximizers; 6. Boosters; 7. Downtoners; 8. Multivariate analysis: intensifiers in a bird's-eye view; 9. Intensifiers across time; 10. The pragmatics of intensifiers; 11. The sociolinguistics of intensifiers; 12. Conclusion: summing up the evidence; Appendices.