Polskie intensyfikatory w ujęciu historycznym

Abstract

The book constitutes an attempt at describing the process of the formation of lexical intensifiers in the history of the Polish language. The work embraces two perspectives of description ― a synchronic and a diachronic one, which supplement each other. The work is divided into two parts ― the first part (chapters 1-3) is theoretical and the second part (chapter 4-8) is analytical. The whole work is enhanced by a conclusion, an index of tables, bibliography and an index of the intensifiers which are mentioned and described in the work. The first part is devoted to a description of intensifiers i.e. lexical expressions to which one ascribes the status of metapredicative operators. In contemporary times these expressions are classified as functional units. There is a description of the status of the intensifiers in the Polish language, their metapredicative nature, which is testimony to their affiliation with the group of functional expressions, their adverbial genesis and the mechanism of their formation over the course of the centuries of their development. The object of detailed considerations is also the notion of intensity, interpreted in the semantic way. The authors of the work also direct the attention of the reader to the relationships between intensification and the conceptual categories of magnitude, quantity and force, as well as to the formation of the category of degree and the transformation of the exponents of intensity. The second part of the book contains detailed analyses of the selected units in the historical context: intensifiers which are based on parametric expressions such as dalece, wysoce, wielce (chapter 4), wielmi (chapter 5), intensifiers associated with the category of force such as silnie, silno, nasilnie (chapter 6), przednie (chapter 7), and the intensifiers associated with the names of the evil spirit such as diabelnie, diablo, kaducznie (chapter 8). These analyses are not only documentative in nature but above all they also prove, enhance and verify the remarks which are generalised in the first part of the book about the intensifiers and the notion of intensity. The work mentions 733 contexts which prove the functioning of the units that are analysed as intensifiers or adverbs, drawn from scholarly and historical dictionaries of the Polish language, the card indices of dictionaries, the corpora of Old Polish texts and the corpora of the modern Polish language. The work was written in the context of the research project entitled “The Polish functional expressions ― a diachronic perspective”, financed by the National Science Centre no. NCN UMO-2011/01/B/HS2/04643.