TY - JOUR AU - Pastuch, Magdalena AU - Wąsińska, Kinga AU - Mitrenga, Barbara PY - 2022/09/30 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - On subjectivisation in the process of the intensifiers formation (on an example of Polish ogromnie [‘enormously’]) JF - Prace Językoznawcze JA - PJUWM VL - 24 IS - 3 SE - Articles DO - 10.31648/pj.7911 UR - https://czasopisma.uwm.edu.pl/index.php/pj/article/view/7911 SP - 27-44 AB - <p>The article presents subjectivisation as the process that initiated changes that transformed<br />the adverb ogromnie (‘enormously’) into an intensifier. Subjectivisation is understood as<br />a process in which a sender communicates a message presenting object, features, activities<br />or processes situating them on his scale of values. The fixation of meaning in the semantic<br />structure of the unit of language whose source is the speaker’s evaluation is called<br />intersubjectivisation. The analysed linguistic material comes from the Electronic Corpus<br />of 17th- and 18th-century Polish Texts (up to 1772), the Polish Language Corpus 1830–1918<br />and the National Corpus of Polish. The study consisted in contextual analysis of linguistic<br />units’ semantic and syntactic properties in the form ogromnie. It was established that<br />even in the 16th century, the adverb ogromnie functioned in the meanings resulting from<br />its etymology, that is related to the meaning of the root -grom-. In the subsequent stages<br />of the development of Polish, there appeared a process of lexicalization, i.e. breaking<br />the semantic link between ogromnie and the base adverb. The intensifier expanded its<br />categorial connectivity compared to the adverb but limited its semantic connectivity, and<br />it coexists only with graded predicates. In contemporary it has entirely lost its connection<br />with its etymon and is an independent language unit belonging to the metatextual level<br />of language. The historical analysis of the intensifier ogromnie made it possible to draw<br />both detailed and more general conclusions relating to the role of subjectivisation in the<br />formation of the metatextual level of language. This change is semantic-pragmatic and<br />consists in fading of the lexical meaning and development of a general meaning related<br />to the speaker’s assessment of a given fragment of reality.</p> ER -