Expressing highest/lowest intensity in Romanian and Spanish. A contrastive-typological approach

Abstract

This paper aims to comparatively present the means of expressing intensity in Romanian and Spanish from a predominantly synchronic perspective, without neglecting the importance of the diachronic study of language facts and the etymological clarifications, where needed. We have chosen to discuss only one aspect of the complex act of evaluation, more specifically, the means of rendering highest and lowest intensity, because of the complexity of this phenomenon which constantly expands its linguistic encoding forms.

Keywords

• intensity
• highest/lowest
• degrees of comparison
• absolute superlative
• synchrony
• diachrony
• electronically-mediated communication
• blog
• prefixation
• suffixation
• lexicalized forms
• grammaticalization
• emphasis
• denotative use
• connotative use