Intensifiers between grammar and pragmatics. A lesson from a language contact situation

Intensification is a more pervasive phenomenon than usually thought, involving
modification and scaling at different levels. Besides adjectives and adverbs, also
the epistemic stance and the illocutionary force of speech acts can be modulated
(Bazzanella et al. 1991; Ghezzi 2013). The strategies speakers use to weaken or
intensify the speaker’s epistemic stance and the illocutionary force of the utterance
include the class of so-called discourse markers (Bazzanella 1995, 2006),
such as, for instance, hedges and boosters, which are hearer-oriented and “work
as social and politeness markers” (Bazzanella 2006: 463), and modalizers, which
modify the speaker’s commitment towards the propositional content. This article
aims to investigate these strategies in a specific language contact situation, which
turns out to be a privileged vantage point to tease out the manifestations of intensification
in everyday language use. We will focus on the Ladin-Italian (and
German) contact area in Trentino-South Tyrol (Northern Italy), with a view to
identifying the strategies that bilingual speakers adopt to express intensification
in their speech. The results of the investigation show that there are different borrowability
rates in the adoption of intensifiers from the pragmatically dominant
languages (Italian and German), whereby intensifiers with a strong intersubjective
function such as those modifying the illocutionary force of the utterance are
borrowed more easily than intensifiers operating at lower (i.e. propositional or
subjective) levels.