| The emotive intensifier is a major sub-category of intensifiers with highlighted heterogenicity,being actively used in the English language.Although emotive intensifiers have been discussed in almost all of the studies on intensifiers,only one or some of them have been discussed in detail and they are treated the same way as “very”,“extremely”,and“highly” etc.Researchers have merely paid attention to their common nature as intensifiers,while neglecting their unique features as distinguished from the ordinary intensifiers.Previous studies have only come to see the “iceberg tip” of intensifiers.There is a great space for special or monographic studies on emotive intensifiers.Emotive intensifier,as the individualized encoding of degrees based on emotional experiences and psychological measurements,are words that people use,in view of their personal emotions,to indirectly express the quality degrees of things or intensity degrees of actions.They are widely used in many different languages.And there are many intensifiers in such basic emotional concepts as HAPPINESS,ANGER,SORROW,FEAR,SURPRISE in the English language.On account of their broad range and huge amount,English intensifiers are gaining a closer attention from researchers.A general review of the emotive intensifier-related studies reveals three shortcomings in the previous researches:(1)Limitations of research scope.These researches mainly focus on the conceptual metaphors of emotive intensifiers,discussing the types of the metaphors within one language or through cross-cultural comparisons.In the special studies and case studies of emotive intensifiers,attention is mainly paid to intensifiers in the regions of “fear” and “happiness”,such as “terribly”,“awfully” and“pretty”,“fairly”,etc..Thus,the first improvement we can make is in the research scope of emotive intensifiers.(2)A separation between synchronic and diachronic studies.The derivation and highlighting of degree meanings of emotive intensifiers is of both a synchronic language phenomenon and a result from the diachronic evolution.Therefore,only with a comprehensive method to look at both their synchronic status and diachronic changes and to reveal the whole picture of their semantic evolution,can we present more objective descriptions and reasonable explanations.(3)A lack of studies concerning the cognitive motivations and mechanisms of the semantic generations and evolutions of emotive intensifiers in the English language.Previous studies have laid much emphasis on their general syntactic and semantic features as intensifiers,with occasional cognitive case studies of English intensifiers from perspectives of grammaticalization or subjectivization.However,the emphasis focused on the common features shared by intensifiers fromdifferent emotional regions is far from enough.As for the cognitive motivations and mechanisms hidden behind language phenomena,studies tend to have very superficial or even no discussion.This study,based on embodied philosophy,employing conceptual metonymy theory and construal principle of lexical semantics,means to delve into the common features of different emotions,to explain the reasons why both positive and negative emotive intensifiers can generate meanings of degree,to investigate their combinations with other concepts and the respective semantic orientations ranging from commendatory to derogatory and then to neutral meanings,and meanwhile,to explore issues such as the derivation and highlighting of the meanings of degree and the related cognitive processing.This study,with synchronic and diachronic,descriptive and explanatory methods closely combined,deals with:(1)the conceptual distribution and the motivations of English emotive intensifiers;(2)the semantic conceptual structures of English emotive intensifiers,including their conceptual structure components and semantic representation;(3)processes and characteristics of semantic derivation changes of English emotive intensifiers;(4)motivations and mechanisms of English emotive intensifiers.What highlights the study is the way to explore motivations for semantic derivation of emotive intensifiers on the basis of emotionalexperiences,combining synchronic and diachronic methods,and to reveal the cognitive patterns with adequate analysis of language data.Major findings of this study are as follows:(1)English emotive intensifiers universally lie in human basic emotional concepts such as HAPINESS,ANGER,SORROW,FEAR and SURPRISE,mainly distributed in negative emotional concepts and sub-emotional categories.And the negative emotional concepts distribution tendency of English emotive intensifiers is a linguistic reflection of people's priorities in their concerns with negative events.Their subcategory tendency comes from the prominent high degree experience of members' in sub-emotional categories.(2)Conceptual structures of English emotive intensifiers can be subdivided into content structures and configurational structures.The content structures include such emotional status as happiness,anger,sorrow,fear and surprise,the abstract measurement in SHELL,and the configurational structures are relations,degrees and unboundedness.As to the semantic representation,first of all,they express the high degree quality of the modified concepts,and they also contain certain emotional meanings and convey the speaker's subjective judgment and evaluation.Based on these semantic features,emotive intensifiers are distinct from the ordinary intensifiers.In use,the original emotional meaning constrains their combinations with other words.In general case,they tendto modify concepts of similar meanings,being positively or negatively semantic oriented.However,in some contexts,semantic conflicts between emotive intensifiers and the words they modify can be observed in such combinations as jolly anxious,dearly angry,awfully good and painfully honest.Emotive intensifiers lose their positive or negative emotional connotations and gain some neutral semantic orientations because of the semantic coercion from the construction meaning of“Emotive Intensifier + X”.(3)There are mainly two semantic evolvement patterns for English emotive intensifiers: directly from emotional to degree meanings;from such meanings as emotion-triggering or physiological/psychological response to emotional meanings,and then to degree meanings.In the light of semantic evolvement features,emotive intensifiers go through a semantic bleaching of emotional meanings and a semantic enhancement of subjective evaluative meanings---emotional nouns,verbs and adjectives are characterized by propositional meanings;but meanings of emotional manner adverbs are more subjective,and meanings cannot be conveyed without propositional meanings;while the meanings of emotive intensifiers are of the strongest subjectivity.(4)The possibility of emotive intensifiers denoting higher rank degree arises ultimately from the experience and cognition of the emotional deviations.Both synchronic and diachronic surveys ofEnglish emotive intensifiers indicate that metonymy,metaphor and profile are the major cognitive mechanisms for the derivation and interpretation of the degree meanings.Among them,metonymy and metaphor provide the mechanisms mainly for semantic extension,while profile a mechanism mainly for meaning understanding.The above mentioned findings show that semantic evolutions are not only changes restricted in the language itself,but also reflections of certain human experience and cognitive information.The meaning of degree of emotive intensifiers is intrinsic in the process of conceptualization,which is the semantic basis for their evolutions into emotive intensifiers.Generally speaking,only when the nature and status of things in the real world exceed the normal condition to reach a comparatively high degree,can people have various emotions.Therefore,both positive and negative emotional experiences are deviations from the normal status.That makes it possible that words implying emotions are able to convey the meaning of degree.Based on frequent language usage and emotional experience,people generalize an “emotive intensifier + X”construction,whose structural meaning “X is in high degree or intensity ”coercion(“X has a high degree or intensity,causing people's emotional experiences such as anger/fear/surprise”),offers the basic motivations for the neutral semantic orientations of emotive intensifiers.In addition,conceptual structures of words contain importantinformation for their semantic evolutions.In actual use,meanings of words are not the whole representations of their conceptual structures,and different interpretations of language come from people's different construal operations of the same conceptual structures.Athanasiadou(2010)'s synchronic explanations of meanings of degree of emotive intensifiers ignore the high-degree potentials of emotional words' conceptual structures.This study implies that meanings of language are,on the one hand,dynamic online negotiations,and on the other,static ones.The evolutions of meanings,to a great extent,rely on people's experience of related things and events and on their ways of conceptualization.Emotive intensifiers have common conceptual structures with their corresponding emotional nouns,verbs,adjectives and adverbs.But what makes them different from these words is the foreground-background shift of their content structures and configurational structures.When they are used as emotive intensifiers,people's construal modes of their conceptual structures have changed,i.e.,the degree of configurational structures and the abstract measurement in content structures come to the foreground,while emotional status goes to the background.At this time,their degree configurational structures dominate their semantic interpretations,highlighting their degree meanings.This phenomenon mostly takes place in the later stages of grammaticalization,with emotiveintensifiers obtaining increasing subjective evaluative meanings,and with psychological measurement tools as their major functions.An analysis of conceptual structures of English emotive intensifiers reveals that meanings,derived from people's actual experience of the real world,provide a basis for language functions and syntactic features.These findings also provide further proof for the fundamental nature of the metonymic mechanism.The metonymies between “the whole ICM and its parts”,and among“the parts in the event ICM”are basic types of metonymy;“An implicit shift in profile is nothing other than the ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon known as metonymy universal in languages”(Langacker 2008:119).K?vecses(2005)points out that metonymic understandings of emotions gradually change to metaphorical understandings,and then to other types of metaphorical understandings.From a diachronic perspective,the evolutions of meanings of English emotive intensifiers indicate that,developing from emotional conceptual metonymy,emotional conceptual metaphor takes place on account of people's further understandings of their emotions.However,emotional metaphors cannot replace emotional metonymies.In fact,along with this process,further develop people's thoughts of emotional conceptual metonymies.This is a reasonable explanation for the derived degree meanings of emotional concepts.Some of English emotive intensifiers are more grammaticized,while others less.However,their tendencies of semantic evolutions are the same: derived degree meanings for descriptions and explanations of the nature of things and status of actions.Nevalainen & Rissanen(2002)point out that,in morphology,the-ly form is more popular in English adverbs.English emotive intensifiers mostly have a structure of “emotional adjective + ly”,and this also complies with the principle.This study deals with meanings of English emotive intensifiers from a cognitive perspective.It is a further and deeper probe into emotive intensifiers as a whole.By combining synchronic with diachronic methods,and descriptive with explanatory paradigms,this study can further or more objectively present the whole picture of semantic evolutions of English emotive intensifiers,offering more reasonable explanations and gaining more insights into the cognitive principles reflected in the language facts.This study offers important evidence to further understand the relations between language and cognition.It is of certain value for reference for lexicography,and it can be directly employed into English teaching in class. |
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