Intensifiers

Chapter 6 investigates the expressive uses of intensifiers with special reference to the Japanese intensifier totemo and the comparative adverb motto. The expressive totemo combines with a negative gradable modal and conventionally implies that the at-issue proposition (without negation and modal) is highly unlikely or impossible and refuses to update the common ground with the at-issue proposition. The meaning of the negative motto combines with an at-issue gradable predicate locally and conventionally implies that the degree of the target in an expected situation is much greater than the target’s current degree. The chapter argues that the expressive totemo and motto belong to lower-level pragmatic scalar modifiers that recycle the scale of an at-issue gradable predicate, and they are fundamentally different from higher-level pragmatic intensifiers, such as the expressive totally, in terms of the level of modification and compositionality.