Conference article

<em>Prices go up, surge, jump, spike, skyrocket, go through the roof…</em> Intensifier Collocations with Parametric Nouns of Type PRICE

Jasmina Milićević
Department of French, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

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Published in: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2017), September 18-20, 2017, Università di Pisa, Italy

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 139:18, p. 145-153

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Published: 2017-09-13

ISBN: 978-91-7685-467-9

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

The paper looks into the expression of intensification with parametric nouns such as PRICE, COST, FEE, RATE, etc., focusing on collocations these nouns form with intensifying adjectives, inchoative and causative intensifying verbs and corresponding de-verbal nouns. Degrees of intensification possible with these nouns are discussed, as well as analytical vs. synthetic expression of intensification (a steep increase in prices ~ a spike in prices). Sample lexicalization rules are proposed—namely, rules that map semantic representations of intensifier collocations headed by nouns of this type to their deepsyntactic representations. The theoretical framework of the paper is Meaning-Text linguistic theory.

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