Escape from Etymology ? A Corpus Study of Polish Adjectival Intensifiers

Using the Polish National Corpus (NKJP), the author discusses 31 Polish reinforcing adverbs to determine the degree of their semantic specificity and freedom of connection with adjectives. Empowering adverbs express the person’s judgement, attitudes, and emotions. The author shows that most of the reinforcing adverbs have not deviated from their etymology, even though they are considered synonyms of the word “very”: their etymological meanings influence the choice of the adjective. The most frequently reinforced adjectives in NKJP are “difficult”, “important” and “essential”.

Yet, we shall see that despite the fact that diabelnie can modify both members of an antonymic pair, it tends to be found most often with negative adjectives, showing that is has perhaps not escaped its etymology entirely. Likewise, we shall see that straszliwie and strasznie, both of which mean "terribly" and come from the same root, in fact combine with very different adjectives. Janus' comprehensive work was completed before the advent of linguistic corpora and was not influenced by frequencies of occurrence. Looking at the corpus data containing intensifiers today we can discern larger trends in their combinatorial properties. In fact, I will argue that most of the intensifiers Janus considered to be near synonyms of bardzo "very", are not semantically neutral and are still prisoners of their etymology. Their residual core meanings correlate with specific speaker attitudes and affect their adjectival collocations.
I consider 31 intensifiers in order to determine to what degree their vestigial meanings affect their collocations with adjectives. I also look at the phenomenon of intensification from the other side and investigate which types of adjectives can be modified by intensifiers and which tend to do so most frequently.

INTENSIFIERS: ETYMOLOGY
The 31 intensifiers I considered are listed below with their English dictionary translations as well as etymological meanings. Grammatically, they are all adverbs formed from adjectives. They are divided into six groups based on their meaning and combinatorial properties 2 .
Christian Vosshagen (1999: 302) comments on English sentences like "It was terribly amusing"; "These examples show that originally negative expressions can be used adverbially to intensify positive ones without creating contradictions. The crucial meaning component here seems to be not the negative value of the concepts, but their intensity". These sentences are used in support of Vosshagen's claim that "forms of language use in which something is uttered to convey its opposite are metonymic" and that "a conceptual entity can be used to provide mental access to its opposite, which is closely associated with it within a conceptual structure" (ibidem: 289). He proposes that a concept stands for its opposite is a widespread metonymy underlying figurative speech (ibidem: 290).
As we shall see below, the corpus data I investigated suggests that the situation in Polish is more complicated than metonymy alone. There are also matters of register and intensifier's lexical preferences. Table 1 presents the numbers of concordances and adjectival collocations in the NKJP from most to least frequent. The numbers in the second column are concordances, or the total number of occurrences in the corpus (not only when modifying adjectives). Even the top words in the table do not come close to the number of occurrences of bardzo "very" (330,099). The numbers in the third column represent the number of adjectives which were found with the intensifier 5 times or more. This does not mean that the intensifier does not occur with other adjectives, it merely indicates how many adjectives it collocates with frequently.  Table 1 we observe that in general larger numbers in the second column correspond to larger numbers in the third one, that is, the more common the intensifier is, the more adjectives it tends to collocate with. This pattern is not absolute though, as wyjątkowo ("exceptionally") and strasznie ("terribly") occur in the corpus with similar frequency, but the number of frequent collocations for wyjątkowo is more than double that of strasznie. This might indicate that strasznie ("terribly") perhaps retains some of its root meaning of strach ("fear", "terror"), which affects its range of combinations. But as we shall see, in the case of strasznie, it is more likely a matter of register. Unlike terribly in English, the Polish strasznie retains a slightly slangy, gushing flavor and cannot combine with adjectives of higher register. Wyjątkowo ("exceptionally") on the other hand has no slangy teenage overtones and can combine with a wide variety of adjectives 4 .
In general, a larger number of collocations is indicative of a higher degree of semantic "bleaching" of the intensifier. That is, that the intensifier has mostly lost its core meaning and shifted to simply indicate intensity. Conversely, the smaller number of collocations means that the sense of the root adjective is still present in the adverb/intensifier's meaning and constrains the words it can combine with. We shall consider intensifiers and their meanings first, adjectives and their preferences second.
The four intensifiers considered here are highly semantically marked and occur with select few adjectives. They imply intensity but also clear speaker judgments based on their core meanings: contempt in the case of bezdennie ("abysmally"), indignation and condemnation for horrendalnie ("exorbitantly") and skandalicznie ("scandalously"), and wonder/amazement mixed with a tinge of envy for bajecznie ("fabulously").
In summary, it seems that the intensifiers in this group are highly specialized and retain the core meaning of their root words. Those which refer to positively valued concepts: god, heaven, angels, occur only with positive adjectives often referring to appearance/beauty. Those which reference devil, Satan, and hell are more complex. The devil seems to be associated with difficulty and complications, Satan -with envied qualities (beauty, perfection) and seems to imply grudging admiration. A similar sense is involved when nieludzko is used with positive adjectives: szatańsko przystojny or nieludzko przystojny ("inhumanly/ infernally handsome") suggest that the speaker is so struck by the looks of someone that they suspect that they could not have come about naturally.
A final note on this group regards the differences in conceptualizations of angels and devils in Polish and English. In English, "diabolically" often correlates with "clever" and "angelically" -with "good". Neither of these adjectives were found as greater than 5 collocations of Polish diabelsko and anielsko. This suggests that angels and devils are conceived of slightly differently in the two cultures. In Polish, the primary attribute of angels is patience and the main function of devils is trouble-making and making things difficult for us.
The two have very different distributions. Szaleńczo is fairly rare and occurs with three main adjectives: zakochany ("in love"), odważny ("brave") and ambitny ("ambitious"). It seems that to be in love, to be brave and to have ambitions or ideas above your station all require a modicum of madness or recklessness. By comparison, English "recklessly" does not function frequently as an intensifier of adjectives. It is most often found with verbs such as "buy", "wander", "drive", "interfere", "say", etc. Szalenie, on the other hand, is the sixth most common intensifier considered here, with 88 adjectival collocations of five or more. It is not pragmatically marked and can be used in all registers.
Of the four intensifiers derived from words which mean "mad", three are fairly specialized and occur with select adjectives, while the fourth, szalenie is among the most common adverbs used to modify adjectives in Polish and there seems to be little connection any more to the meaning of szał ("rage", "fury", "madness") which is at its root.
At the root of okropnie is either splatter/dirt or hot liquid found in hell and while the etymology is not at all transparent to Polish speakers, this intensifier is most often found with negative adjectives. Out of 21 collocations the only two with positive meaning referred to size: duży ("big") and wielki ("great"). Potwornie, on the other hand, has a very transparent root: potwór ("monster"), so its literal translation is "monstrously". It, too, rarely occurs with positive adjectives (7 out of 76 collocations). Cholernie, whose link to cholera ("cholera") a terrible disease, is quite clear, 9 would seem to fall in the same category. But cholera is not only a name of a disease, it is also a mild swearword in Polish (since the 19 th century [Bańkowski 2000: 142]), used to express not only anger 9 Though its earliest uses in Polish (16 th century, Bańkowski 2000: 142) refer to one of the four humors which formed the basis of medieval medicine. Pobrane z czasopisma Annales N -Educatio Nova http://educatio.annales.umcs.pl Data: 02/09/2021 04:00:29 U M C S or frustration, but equally often astonishment and admiration and cholernie is not restricted to modifying negative adjectives.
With the exception of the very common strasznie ("terribly") and the slangy cholernie, the intensifiers in this group, which are most often translated into English as "terribly", "awfully" tend to modify negative adjectives and participles.

Summary
We have seen that the core meanings of intensifiers do affect the range of adjectives they can modify and convey not only the speakers' assessment of the intensity of a feature, but also their perceptions and evaluations. Other than the register-neutral "exceptional" group, most intensifiers we considered show distinct preferences for specific types of adjectives and imply attitudes ranging from awe, approbation and (sometimes grudging) admiration to indignation, condemnation and contempt. We next turn to adjectives and examine which types of Polish adjectives tend to be modified by intensifiers.

ADJECTIVES AND THEIR PREFERENCES
Intensification of adjectives implies two things: i) inherent gradablity of the feature modified by the intensifier (e.g. bardzo prostopadły ["very perpendicular"] is impossible), and ii) the speaker's perception and evaluation of reality. Adding an intensifier to an adjective suggests that a feature denoted by it is markedly different when compared to another object with the same feature. Many of the intensifiers are hyperbolic. All of them provide information about the speaker's perception of reality.
Which adjectives can be modified by an intensifier? Janus (1981: 80) proposed that the primary type of a modifiable adjective is a parametric expression. She defines parametric adjectives as those which denote measurable amounts (duży ["big"], długi ["long"]) and whose basic form is semantically more complex than the comparative (e.g. duży ["big"] is defined as "bigger than normal/expected"). Parametric adjectives typically enter into antonymic relations and both elements of the antonymic pair can be intensified (mały ["small"] as well as duży ["big"]). In addition to parametric adjectives, which include expression of size, volume, temperature, density, weight, loudness, strength, age/length of time. Janus (1981: 131-134) lists the following types of adjectives as modifiable by intensifiers: i) adjectives directly relating to amounts (e.g. liczny ["numerous"]), ii) adjectives referring to evaluations or feelings: positive and negative evaluation, positive and negative feelings, neutral evaluations and feelings, iii) adjectives relating to physical/physiological feelings and states including smell and taste, and iv) adjectives relating to change of state (e.g. blady ["pale"], opalony ["tanned"], siwy ["grey-haired"]).
We shall verify Janus' and Grzegorczykowa's claims in two ways: by looking at the most robust collocations for each intensifier (Table 8), and by trying to determine which adjectives tend to pair up with intensifiers by considering those that are found with at least five of ten intensifiers (Table 9). Table 8 lists the intensifiers in the same order as in Table 1, from the most to least frequent in terms of total occurrences. It also lists their top five adjectival collocations in order of decreasing frequency from left to right, i.e. second column gives the most numerous collocation.
The top nine most frequent adverbs in Table 8 tend to occur with similar adjectives, while the following intensifiers (beginning with straszliwie ["horrifically"]) retain more of their core meaning and collocate with more specific adjectives. Based on the data in Table 8, the most frequent collocation for the top six intensifiers turns out to be the adjective trudny ("difficult"), it is the number one or two collocation for all six. It also appears among the top five collocations for eight other intensifiers, and, as we shall see in Table 9, it is the most often modified adjective Pobrane z czasopisma Annales N -Educatio Nova http://educatio.annales.umcs.pl Data: 02/09/2021 04:00:29 U M C S Table 9. Adjectival collocations with 10 intensifiers  with both trudny and ważny occurring with an intensifier over 1,100 times, while the next most often modified adjective duży ("big") is found with an intensifier only 317 times (roughly 1/3 of the frequency of trudny and ważny), and the numbers diminish from there. It is also instructive to see that only three adjectives: trudny ("difficult"), ciężki ("difficult"/"heavy") and drogi ("expensive") occurred with nine out of ten intensifiers. The remaining 26 adjectives were much more picky.
Adjectives in Tables 8 and 9 largely overlap and the data in Table 9 also confirm Grzegorczykowa's and Janus' predictions. The top ten adjectives most frequently modified by intensifiers refer to difficulty, importance, quality (good/ bad), size, strength and price. However, based on this study, Grzegorczykowa's and Janus' order of adjectives most often modified by intensifiers should be adjusted: those expressing judgment (trudny ["difficult"], ważny ["important"]) are modified far more frequently than those expressing measurable quantities or psychological states.

CONCLUSIONS
This paper looked at the phenomenon of adjectival intensification from two directions. I examined 31 intensifiers and their frequencies (concordances) and collocations (which adjectives they occur with most frequently, at least 5 times in the corpus) to determine the degree of their semantic specificity and combinatorial freedom. It turns out that those which correspond to English "terribly"/"awfully" tend to collocate with negative adjectives. Negated intensifiers, imply crossing a limit or a line, but are found mostly with adjectives with positive meanings. Three of the four mad-based adverbs are very selective, as are intensifiers in the earth, heaven and hell group. Finally, the highly specialized group is very selective indeed and does not allow collocations beyond the chosen few. We have also seen that register plays a role, while strasznie ("terribly") is more mainstream than cholernie ("damnedly"), neither would be found with, e.g., radosny ("joyful", "joyous") which is of a higher register.
It turns out that the vast majority of intensifiers we considered do retain vestigial meanings of their roots and that this affects their selectional properties. Intensifiers express the fact that some gradable feature is present in the speakers' midst to an unexpected degree and their need to comment on it. The choice of intensifier is rarely random, it is often driven by the type of feeling this unexpected situation evokes. It expresses the speakers' judgments, attitudes and emotions about this unexpected turn of events. Some Polish intensifiers are very specialized, others are quite generic, and most are in between (wide-ranging but still affected by core meaning or register).
Pobrane z czasopisma Annales N -Educatio Nova http://educatio.annales.umcs.pl Data: 02/09/2021 04:00:29 U M C S Looking at this phenomenon from the adjectives' side, this study has brought a new result to the previous work (Grzegorczykowa [1975] and Janus [1981]). Based on corpus data, it turns out that the most often modified adjectives refer not to measurable qualities but to judgments, and especially difficulty and importance. Further avenues of study include a closer look at history. Bałabaniak and Mitrenga (2015) offer an excellent diachronic study of intensifiers themselves and their combinability, but it would be interesting to see which adjectives tended to be intensified over time.