Semantics Research Group Meeting, November 29, 2013

This talk considers intensifiers such as the English "totally", Viennese German "ur" and Japanese "zenzen". We first examine their use as property modifiers, showing that they interact with gradable predicates and indicate that the associated property holds to a high degree, though, in some cases, together with an expressive component that requires analysis as mixed expressives. We then turn to their use as propositional modifiers. Here, the intensifiers again express a high or maximal point, this time on a scale of confidence with respect to the propositional content, which we analyze as an expressively introduced knowledge statement by the speaker.