The intensifying function of the adverbs this and that can be traced back
to the 14th century, when they just appeared in combination with gradable
scalar adjectives like big ¿ small, good ¿ bad, easy ¿ difficult, etc. The
20th century has witnessed the rapid diffusion of these intensifiers, but
not only in terms of occurrence (both in speech and writing) but also in
terms of scope, accepting the other types of gradable adjectives, both
limit and extreme adjectives (i.e. dead ) together with non-gradable
adjectives (Paradis 2001: 50-53; 2008: 1317-318).
The present study investigates the use and distribution of these degree
modifiers in present-day English with the following objectives: (a) to
trace the development of these intensifiers; (b) to analyse the frequency
of the construction from a variationist perspective; (c) to cast light on
the lexical semantic structure of the right-hand collocates in terms of
their mode of construal and their attitudinal features; and (d) to
describe their developmental path. The source of evidence for this study
comes from the tagged version of the British National Corpus developed by
Mark Davis (BNC-BYU).
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