Rettenetes friss, iszonyú sok, szörnyű vígság: negatív emotív intenzitásjelölők variációjáról 16–18. századi szövegtípusokban

The use of negative emotive intensifiers (henceforth: NEIs) is a socially and culturally embedded pragmatic feature thus lending itself to variation and change. NEIs are those adverbs which have negative emotive original meanings but later possess a function of intensifying the elements they modify. Modern Hungarian is well-researched in this aspect while the historical periods of Hungarian are less sufficiently studied. The aim of the present corpus study is to examine the variation and change of NEIs between 16th and 18th century in different registers (witch trials, private correspondence, memoirs and dramas). The socially embedded feature of NEIs is that in earlier periods of Hungarian, only a few negative emotive word have been found functioning as intensifiers, and they occurred in positive contexts infrequently. However, based on the data from certain authors of the period, NEIs have been entrenched in language use. The culturally embedded feature of NEIs is that the semantic contents of the elements with NEI function in the studied sources are characterized by FEAR and DISGUST, all of them are equivalents of horrible ~ horribly and terrible ~ terribly. The analysis focuses on the collocational patterns of the NEIs, involving the word class and the concept of the target and the actual polarity of the NEI in the studied contexts. The results also raise the question on the relationship between delexicalization, polarity loss, and polarity shift from a historical point of view.