Boring as hell: a corpus study of intensifying post-modification of predicative adjectives in the ‘ADJ as NOUN’ frame

Abstract

This paper presents a phenomenon that has attracted little attention despite being relatively frequent and very productive in spoken language. The aim of this study is to prove that the ‘ADJ as NOUN’ frame, which is commonly used to form comparative phrases and similes, is also employed to intensify the meaning of predicative adjectives in both English and Czech but without the element of comparison. This study analyses data from two spoken corpora; the Spoken BNC2014 for English, and ČNK — ORAL_v1 for Czech. The corpus data serve as evidence confirming the existence of this pattern as a distinct entity with its own functions alongside being used in comparisons and similes. The results further show that both languages display semantic incongruence between the adjectives and nouns co-occurring in this structure. However, each language uses nominal elements from different lexical fields. Finally, the paper discusses potential issues of interpretation and the general motivation behind the usage of intensifying post-modification.

Keywords

• corpus data
• intensification
• post-modification
• predicative adjectives
• simile