Abstract
Morphological and syntactic adjective intensification in L2 Italian and German in a multilingual context
Adjective intensification is the use of any linguistic device that scales a quality, by establishing different degrees of that given quality (Bolinger 1972). The grading of a quality adds expressive richness to one’s message; as such, intensifiers can be iden1fied as markers of subjectivity (Athanasiadou 2007), and intensification itself as a phenomenon at the interface between lexicon, grammar, pragmatics and discourse.
The mechanisms involved in its acquisition and use in second languages are highly relevant in the field of Second Language Acquisition: the increase in the “volume” of a message involves a specific ability to express subjectivity and evaluation, which learners are required to acquire in their second language learning process.
We will present a comparative study in which we analyzed the use of the intensified adjective construction [[X]int [Y]ADJ]AP ‘very Y’ by young learners of Italian and German from the mul1lingual region of South Tyrol (Italy). Italian and German share a wide range of intensifying construc1ons, relying both on morphological (e.g., the superlative prefix construction strapieno, superschön) and syntactic resources (e.g., the prototypical adverb + adjective construction molto bello, sehr schön). However, Italian and German also rely on language-specific means, such as the Italian superlative suffix -issimo (bellissimo) and the German compound intensifying construction (spiegelglatt). We adopted a Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) approach (Höder et al. 2021), a usagebased approach to language contact situations, which allowed us to distinguish idio- from diaconstructions of Italian and German: all constructions used in a multilingual community, whether language-specific (idioconstructions) or unspecified for language use (diaconstruc1ons) are stored in the constructicon of the community members. In such a context, learning an additional language implies a continuous reorganization of the individual constructicon. Based on this approach, we partially replicated previous research from a different multilingual area (Van Goethem & Hendrikx 2021) and investigated the ways in which morphological intensifying constructions relate to syntactic intensifying constructions. Using mixed-effect models, we analyzed the use of the intensified adjective construction in the Italian and German sub-corpora of Kolipsi-1 (Glaznieks et al. forthcoming), a learner corpus of L2 German and Italian. The corpus consists of wrifen essays (around 470,000 tokens) produced by ca. 1,250 students from Italian and German South Tyrolean upper secondary schools.
Our research question was: Are there any differences in the rela1onship between morphological and syntactic intensification used by L2 Italian and L2 German young learners from the multilingual Italian region of South Tyrol? How do construc1ons on different levels reorganize during the acquisitional process? Preliminary results show that if learners of L2 Italian are considered, the dominant German environment is a significant predictor of their preference for intensifying adverb construtions. However, the morphological -issimo construction is still used by L2 Italian learners, especially with high frequency adjectives, and compete with the syntactic one despite being an idioconstruction specified for Italian. Conversely, learners of L2 German seem to prefer intensifying adverb constructions regardless of their L1 or linguis1c environment, at the expense of the compound intensifying construction, which is used only occasionally.
References
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