Abstract
Intensification is the use of any linguistic device that scales a quality, by establishing different degrees of that given quality (Bolinger 1972). Previous studies in second language acquisition investigated adjective intensification in advanced learners of English (e.g., Lorenz, 1998), while few have focused on other languages (Hendrikx et al. 2019), and on younger learners (e.g., Hasselgård 2022). Some of their most relevant results highlight learners’ overuse of all-purpose, delexicalized adverbial intensifiers (e.g., very).
We will present a comparative study in which we analyzed the use of the adjective intensification construction [[X]int [Y]ADJ]AP ‘very Y’ in the Italian and German subcorpora of Kolipsi (Glaznieks et al. forthcoming), a learner corpus collection for L2 Italian and German. The corpus consists of written essays (with about 570,000 tokens) from the multilingual Italian province of South Tyrol. Applying a Diasystematic Construction Grammar approach (Höder et al. 2021), which allows us to distinguish idio- from diaconstructions of Italian and German, we replicated previous research from a different multilingual area (Van Goethem & Hendrikx 2021) and analysed the occurrence of the [[X]int [Y]ADJ]AP ‘very Y’ construction on different levels of schematicity using mixed-effect models.
Our research question was: Are there differences in the way L2 Italian and L2 German young learners from the multilingual province of South Tyrol use adjective intensification in written essays?
We found the main difference between learners of Italian and German on the most abstract level of analysis, where we investigated the effect of different variables (e.g., L1, linguistic environment) on the choice of morphological ([[X]AFFIX [Y]ADJ]ADJ) or syntactic intensification types (e.g., [[X]ADV [Y]ADJ]AP). For L2 Italian learners, the linguistic environment is a significant predictor for their choice (Author, forthcoming). L2 German learners prefer intensifying adverb constructions regardless of their L1 or linguistic environment.
References:
Author (forthcoming): Intensification in written L2 Italian: Insights from the multilingual region of South Tyrol.
Bolinger, D. (1972). Degree Words. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Glaznieks, A., Frey, J.-C., Abel, A., Nicolas, L. & Vettori, C. (forthcoming). The Kolipsi Corpus Family. A collection of Italian and German L2 learner texts from secondary school pupils. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics.
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Hendrikx, I., Van Goethem, K. & Wulff, S. (2019). Intensifying constructions in French- speaking L2 learners of English and Dutch: cross-linguistic influence and exposure effects. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, Vol. 5:1, pp. 63–103.
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Van Goethem, K. & Hendrikx, I. (2021). Intensifying constructions in second language acquisition. A diasystematic-constructionist approach. In: H. C. Boas & S. Höder (eds.): Constructions in Contact 2: Language change, multilingual practices, and additional language acquisition. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 376–428.