The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction

Language intensity has been investigated within several disciplines, such as linguistics, stylistics and social psychology, and from several approaches. As a result, a wide range of intensifying elements and effects have been identified. In this chapter, we demonstrate on the basis of a qualitative corpus-analytical study that two dimensions play a decisive role in the discrimination of intensified language: contextuality and semantic richness. Contextuality reflects the degree to which the inte