Intensifying structures of adjectives across German and Italian

Grading and intensifying are primary cognitive operations that have an important expressive function. This paper analyses examples of composition, prefix‑ and suffix-derivation as adjective formation methods that intensify the meaning of adjectives in the German (e.g. eiskalt, blitzschnell, steinreich, erzfrech, urgesund, superelegant etc.) and Italian (e.g. ricco sfondato, stanco morto; strafelice, straricco etc.) language. Both languages have wide range of possibilities for intensifying the meaning of adjectives: In the German language, research literature (Fleischer & Barz 1995; Eichinger 2000; Kirschbaum 2002) states that composition and prefix-derivation are the most used methods of adjective intensification. Italian, like other Romance languages, intensifies adjectives through the absolute superlative with the Latin-derived suffix ‑issimo or with some intensifying prefixes derived from Greek, Latin or English (iperattivo, ultranazionale, supergentile etc.) (Rainer 1983; Costa 1997; Serianni 2006). This paper focuses on the argument that even if German and Italian are two languages belonging to a different language family, they share some means to express intensity in adjectives. The data used for this analysis will be mainly extracted from the most relevant monolingual encyclopaedic dictionaries as comparative databases.