The Acquisition of Intensifiers

Insa Gülzow analyzes the acquisition of intensifiers by children acquiring German or English as their first language. Based on a comparative analysis of intensifiers and related expressions in the two languages, she examines the longitudinal production data of six German-speaking and six English-speaking children with regard to when and in which contexts the intensifiers German selbst/selber and English x-self (myself, yourself, himself, etc.) appear. As intensifiers evoke alternatives to the re