some remarks on intensification of nouns in latin

Journal of Latin Linguistics 2014; 13(2): 243 – 266

Maria NapoliSome remarks on intensification of nouns in Latin

Abstract: The phenomenon of intensification – intended as the strategy of scaling upwards or downwards the semantic content of linguistic entities belonging to different word classes (i.e., not only adjectives but also nouns and verbs) – has received a great deal of attention from both a synchronic and a diachronic point of view. This paper investigates intensification of Latin nouns in the light of recent research in theoretical linguistics on this topic, by giving a preliminary account of some issues related to the Latin state of affairs. I will examine the strategies em-ployed to intensify nouns in some Plautus’ and Cicero’s texts, by focusing on the use of adverbs as intensifiers expressing a high degree or the highest degree. Moreover, it will be shown that the approach followed in this paper, based on the individuation of the degree meaning of adjectives, may cast new light on their use as nominal intensifiers in the Latin language. It will be further suggested that in Latin nouns may be strengthened by intensifiers independently of their being gradable or not, as happens in modern languages.

Keywords: degree, nouns, intensification, intensifiers, absolute superlative, maximizers, boosters

DOI 10.1515/joll-2014-0010

1 IntroductionIntensification may be defined as a linguistic strategy related to the expression of degree, since it scales upwards or downwards the properties referred to by a given entity (Bolinger 1972). Gradable elements exhibiting the feature of being measur-able along a scale can be intensified: as a tendency, this is proper to adjectives, which typically allow manifestation of degree. However, gradability is not only a characteristic of the adjectival class. In this paper, I follow the approach proposed by Sapir (1944: 94) – and shared by many scholars (among others, Bolinger 1972: 15; Cuzzolin and Lehmann 2004: 1212–1213; Paradis 2008: 317, 323; Sassoon 2011: 314) – on the basis of which gradability may be associated with all word classes,

Maria Napoli: Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale. E-mail: [email protected]

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including nouns and verbs. This obviously means that also nouns and verbs may be intensified, as illustrated by (1a) and (1b), respectively:

(1) (Bolinger 1972: 82, 146) a. He is a big fool (= ‘he is very foolish’) b. I wish he hadn’t failed so (= ‘so badly’)

Ancient Indo-European languages document cases proving intensification and, more in general, gradation of nouns. As mentioned by Cuzzolin and Lehmann (2004: 1214), comparison may occur on nouns, as in Sanskrit vira-tará ‘more hero’, Ancient Greek kún-teros ‘(more) shameless’, literally ‘more dog’. Moreover, Ancient Greek, for example, exhibits intensification of nouns by means of the superlative suffix, as shown by the Homeric form basileútatos ‘most kingly’, liter-ally ‘most king’ (Napoli 2010: 209).

A Latin example is provided below, where the adverb magis ‘more’ intensifies the plural noun asinos ‘donkeys’, reflecting a colloquial style (on the use of magis, see Cuzzolin 2011: 597–601):

(2) (Pl. Pseud. 135; Ricca 2010: 167) Neque ego homines magis asinos numquam vidi ‘I have never seen human beings who were such asses’

To my knowledge, the issue of nominal intensification in Latin has never attracted great attention. This paper attempts to investigate the way to intensify nouns in the Latin language, through a survey of previous suggestions on this phenome-non and through a corpus-based analysis. I have analyzed data taken from six texts by two authors, Plautus and Cicero,1 considered as representative of Archaic Latin and Classical Latin, respectively. This corpus undoubtedly represents a lim-ited collection of data. However, the aim of this contribution is not to examine nominal intensification in depth, by offering a systematic and exhaustive descrip-tion of this topic, but to make some remarks preliminary to a full-scale study,

1 Plautus, Amphitruo (Pl. Am.), Bacchides (Pl. Bac.), Menaechmi (Pl. Men.); Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum (Cic. Att.), De oratore (Cic. de orat.), Tusculanae disputationes (Cic. Tusc.). Texts and translations follow the Loeb editions, with some modifications of the relevant portions. I addi-tionally refer to examples from the following authors and texts, found in works on this topic or through occasional readings: Caesar, De bello civile (Caes. civ.); Cicero, Pro domo sua (Cic. dom.), Epistulae ad familiares (Cic. Fam.), In Verrem (Cic. Verr.); Horatius, Saturae (Hor. sat.); Plautus, Aulularia (Pl. Aul.), Pseudolus (Pl. Pseud.); Porphyrio, Commentum in Horati Sermones (Porph. Comm.). The dictionaries used are the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (ThLL) and the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1968–1982. London: Clarendon Press).


Some remarks on intensification of nouns in Latin 245

which obviously needs much more research on Latin material, as well as a more detailed discussion of various theoretical problems.

Before introducing the content of this paper, a remark is in order here. In literature, the label intensification is also employed to define the use of re- flexive pronouns with an emphasizing value, a phenomenon well-known to Indo- European languages. In this respect, the Latin pronoun ipse ‘himself (herself, itself, etc.)’ has been defined as an intensifier.2 This is illustrated by the following example:

(3) (Cic. Fam 2, 11, 2; Puddu 2005: 209–210) Ipse dies me admonebat ‘This day itself reminds me of it’

In my contribution, I will not discuss this use, which is widely studied, but I shall concentrate on intensification in Bolinger’s terms and, more precisely, on the ex-pression of a high degree or the highest degree by means of intensifiers of differ-ent nature.

The present paper is organized as follows. Section 2 contains a brief introduc-tion to intensification, with particular regard to the use of intensifiers with nomi-nal bases. In Section 3 I turn to the Latin state of affairs, by summing up the few observations on this phenomenon found in previous studies. Section 4 illustrates the data taken from my corpus. Section 5 draws some conclusions and tries to suggest possible developments to the approach followed here.

2 IntensificationIntensification (as described in Section 1) is realized by means of different types of intensifiers. By definition, an intensifier is a degree modifier, which corre-sponds to “any device that scales a quality, whether up or down or somewhere between the two” (Bolinger 1972: 17). Intensifiers are expressive in nature, strengthen the element with which they combine, and can be regarded as markers of subjec-tivity (Athanasiadou 2007), since they encode the writer’s/speaker’s perspective/attitude/viewpoint.3 They also serve different pragmatic and textual functions

2 Cf., among others, Bertocchi (2000), Puddu (2005), Fruyt (2011a), Fruyt (2011b).3 From a diachronic point of view, following Traugott’s (1989; Traugott 1995) theoretical ap-proach, the process of change whereby linguistic elements like adverbs acquire a degree mean-ing is an instance of subjectification: more in general, “subjectification in grammaticalisation is, broadly speaking, the development of grammatically identifiable expression of speaker belief or


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(Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994), and show a great deal of internal diversity (Constantinescu 2011; Beltrama forthcoming).

Bolinger (1972: 17) identified four types of intensifiers, depending on the part of the scale that they occupy: (i) boosters (upper part of the scale, looking up); (ii) compromisers (middle of the scale); (iii) diminishers (lower part of the scale, look-ing down); (iv) minimizers (lower end of the scale). The four classes are illustrated by the following examples:

(4) (Bolinger 1972: 17) a. He is a perfect idiot b. She is fairly happy c. It was an indifferent success d. He’s a bit of an idiot

The cases in (4) exhibit inherent intensification, or proper degree intensification, which should be distinguished from extensive intensification, i.e., intensification of the trait of quantity (as in mass nouns and plural nouns). Many lexical intensi-fiers occur with both meanings:

(5) (Bolinger 1972: 58) a. It was too little of a bother for me to complain (degree) b. He has too little patience (quantitative)

It is worth mentioning that Paradis (2001, 2008) has revised Bolinger’s classifica-tion in the light of the notion of boundedness. She distinguishes between two main classes of modifiers, i.e., totality modifiers and scalar modifiers. Totality modifiers are bounded and include, for instance, maximizers like completely, absolutely, perfectly, designating the absolute degree, which corresponds to “the perfect match with a maximum or a BOUNDARY” (Paradis 2008: 321; emphasis in the original). Scalar modifiers are unbounded and include, for instance, boosters like very, extremely, terribly, expressing a high degree and having a “reinforcing effect” on the property that they modify. Depending on their being bounded or unbounded, linguistic entities select different degree modifiers.

As remarked at the end of Section 1, in this paper I shall concentrate on the class of intensifiers which scale a property upwards. From a cross-linguistic point

speaker attitude to what is said. It is a gradient phenomenon, whereby forms and constructions that at first express primarily concrete, lexical and objective meanings come through repeated use in local syntactic contexts to serve increasingly abstract, pragmatic, interpersonal, and speaker-based functions” (Traugott 1995: 32).



of view, the commonest way of expressing a high grade or the highest grade – corresponding to the notional content of the absolute superlative (Sapir 1944: 113–114) – is represented by adverbs deriving from different lexical sources (on European languages, see Austerlitz 1991; cf. also Cuzzolin and Lehmann 2004). Apart from this analytical strategy, which corresponds to “the only possible means creating the superlative” in several languages (Cuzzolin and Lehmann 2004: 1217), synthetic formations exist as a result of various morphological pro-cesses (examples from Cuzzolin and Lehmann 2004: 1217–1218): in particular, ad-jectives may be graded by means of reduplication, as in Sumerian bar ‘external’ versus barbar ‘very external = foreigner, barbarian’, as well as by means of affixes (cf. the Celtic prefix an-, as in Irish maith ‘good’ versus an-mhaith ‘very good’). The coexistence of different means of representing a high degree or the highest degree in the same language is not surprising; to quote from Austerlitz (1991):

the mechanisms (forms, words, and multiples of these) which serve to express this category [absolute superlative, M.N.] are in constant competition with each other, viz. English very, a most, truly, greatly, awfully, terribly, really. These competitors are mostly propelled by forces emanating from style (novelty, power, elegance, exaggeration); in short, they are creative. (Austerlitz 1991: 2)

We will turn now to inherent intensification of nominal bases.4

2.1 Intensification of nouns

As pointed out in Section 1, elements from different word classes may be inher-ently intensified if they are gradable, i.e., if they designate a quality, a property, or a state of affairs which may be conceived of as holding to a higher or lesser degree. Generally, nouns are regarded as gradable if they contain an intensifiable feature equivalent to an adjective. In English, nouns may be intensified by vari-ous strategies in order to express a high degree: adverbs (e.g., more, much, very, pretty, too, etc.), degree adjectives (e.g., big, great, complete, absolute, etc.),5 eval-uative morphology (e.g., prefixes such as super, mega, etc.). An example is the following, where a noun phrase is modified by such:

(6) (Bolinger 1972: 89) Don’t be such a lover boy. The girls like you more aloof (= ‘don’t be so devoted

to girls’)

4 Intensification of nouns in a quantitative sense will not be treated in this contribution.5 Cf. Section 4.2 in this paper.


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According to Wierzbicka (1986: 360–375), prototypical nouns, denoting concrete entities such as people, animals, or human artifacts, are non-gradable, whereas atypical nouns, like hero or saint, can be inflected for degree (cf. also Wierzbicka 1986: 385, note 2). What makes atypical nouns more readily accessible to intensi-fication is the fact that they generally evoke a single feature, similar to the way adjectives generally evoke a single property, in opposition to prototypical nouns:

What most nouns (prototypical nouns) do is to identify a certain kind of person, a kind of thing, a kind of animal. [. . .] The meaning of a noun cannot be represented as a set of “features”, because the basic function of a noun is to single out a certain KIND, a kind which may be partly described in terms of features but which cannot be reduced to a set of fea-tures. (Wierzbicka 1986: 360; emphasis in the original)

In natural language, the world tends to be categorized into a number of kinds, each kind characterized by, but not reducible to, a cluster of properties. If a speaker goes against this tendency and categorizes a person in terms of a single property, using a noun such as fool, fatso, or liar, he does it, so to speak, on purpose: he wants to stress, hyperbolically, the property in question, and his own emotional reaction to it; he wants to exaggerate that property, and to show that in his eyes it looms so large that it determines his way of seeing the referent, to the exclusion of other properties. (Wierzbicka 1986: 365)

However, as recently recognized by various scholars, also “prototypical” non-gradable nouns can be employed as focusing on a single property or on a cluster of properties which may be intensified: to use Paradis’ (2008: 318) words, “even linguistic expressions that at first sight do not appear to be associated with grading, such as man or book, may on many occurrences of use highlight proper-ties that are gradable.” In English, for instance, the prefix super- functions as a booster with nouns, by indicating that the referent of a noun X is an excellent and outstanding type of X: a superwoman is “a woman who fulfils her many roles with apparently superhuman efficiency” (Collins English Dictionary), i.e., a woman of unusual strength, intelligence, or ability, as well as superbrain refers to “an ex-ceptionally intelligent person, a very brainy person” (Collins English Dictionary). In other words, non-gradable nouns may be coerced into gradable uses and may be combined with degree modifiers.

In this respect, an interesting contribution has been recently provided by Constantinescu (2011), who has deeply explored gradability in the nominal domain. By examining the tests for gradability traditionally used in the literature, she has shown how these tests often yield diverging results, and how the distinc-tion between gradable and non-gradable nouns is rather far from being clear-cut. I will briefly comment on one of the cases discussed by Constantinescu (2011), involving the use of wh-exclamatives (in particular, the construction What (a) Noun):



(7) (Constantinescu 2011: 22) What courage they showed!

(8) (Constantinescu 2011: 22) What a {doctor/ attorney/ monarch/ teacher/ informant} John is!

On the basis of Bolinger’s (1972) approach, the example in (7) – where, clearly, the exclamation points to a high degree of courage – gets a proper degree interpreta-tion, as opposed to example (8), where the nouns involved, which belong to the class of substantives denoting professions, are non-gradable.6 Moreover, exam-ple (8) may have different interpretations, due to the intensifying non-degree function of what. First of all, an exclamation like “what a doctor John is!” may get a prototypical interpretation, by highlighting that John is the perfect instance of a doctor (cf. Bolinger 1972: 72–73). The exclamation may also refer to the quality with which John performs his job, i.e., his being a good or a bad doctor (cf. the discus-sion in Constantinescu 2011: 22). Finally, with this construction a figurative or metaphorical interpretation is possible, especially when the selected noun evokes a stereotype. This interpretation “whereby an individual is attributed properties stereotypically associated with being N, can also be found with other basically non-gradable nouns, whether [+human] (e.g., man, boy, child, baby etc.) or [−human] (e.g. hut, palace, pigsty etc.). Nouns are normally used in this way to convey some kind of evaluation, whether positive or negative, and are thus close to epithets” (Constantinescu 2011: 24). An example of this specific use is quoted in (9):

(9) (Constantinescu 2011: 24) What a {man/ baby} John is!

Following Constantinescu (2011), a unified explanation can be provided for the occurrence of both gradable and non-gradable nouns within this structure, as well as for other constructions generally regarded as denoting degree (e.g., such (a) Noun, quite a Noun, etc.). More specifically, the application of wh-exclamatives always presupposes the same mechanism, independently of the nature of the noun, i.e., the intensification of a gradable property. This property may be “internal” to the noun, which means that it may be part of its denotation, as for

6 In this respect, Bolinger (1972) distinguished the intensifying use of what, exemplified by (7), from its identifying use, as represented in (8). I agree with Constantinescu (2011: 21) who claims that the label identifying “is somewhat misleading though, since with wh-exclamatives there is always a sense of intensification”.


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courage in (7), or it may be “external,” i.e., contextually inferable, as for doctor in (8): obviously, somebody may be an excellent doctor or an awful doctor, depend-ing on his skill in doing this job (Constantinescu 2011: 143–147).

To discuss all the complex aspects related to nominal gradability – which is clearly different in nature from the type of gradability featured by adjectives (cf. Sassoon 2013) – is far beyond the scope of the present paper. However, what is relevant to our issue is that the data discussed, among others, by Paradis (2008) and Constantinescu (2011) demonstrate how nouns may be intensified in various ways and in spite of their being non-gradable, since “gradability is not just a matter of scalarity, but of subjectivity as well” (Pander Maat 2006: 315). This is a fundamental starting point for the discussion of the Latin state of affairs.

3 Strategies of intensification in LatinIn the Latin language, one can identify the following main strategies of intensification (for an overview, cf. Cuzzolin 2011): (i) the superlative suffix -issimus; (ii) morphological processes of prefixation with an evaluative value, including two particularly productive prefixes, i.e., per- and prae-, the meaning of which is similar to the meaning of -issimus; (iii) various adverbs (cf. Section 3.1, Section 4). In Section 4.1, also the intensifying function of adjectives will be dealt with.

Both -issimus and elative prefixes typically combine with gradable bases of adjectival nature, and also with adverbs: this means that they are not extended to nouns.7 An example is quoted below, illustrating the use of per-:

(10) (Cic. dom. 50, 14) . . . id quod M. Drusus in legibus suis plerisque, perbonus ille vir [. . .], non

obtinuerit ‘. . . what the exemplary Marcus Drusus failed in many of his enactments to

win’

7 On intensive per- and prae-, cf. André (1951), Hofmann and Szantyr (1965: 163–165), Francis (1973: 23–32), Fruyt (2005), Cuzzolin (2011: 643–646), Gaide (2012: 68–69); on -issimus, cf. Bel- trama (forthcoming). Interestingly enough, Francis (1973: 29) noted that “two kinds of intensive prae-, comparative and superlative (cf. English ‘too’ and ‘very’) seem to be attested.” Neverthe-less, he recognized that it is often difficult to distinguish between the two values, and that “in several words, the distinction was probably blurred and depended on the meaning of the sim-plex.” Finally, as pointed out by Cuzzolin (2011: 643), it is not clear if the intensification by means of per- and prae- is an inherited or borrowed feature (see also André 1951: 146–147).



Interestingly enough, as pointed out by Cuzzolin (2011), in some occurrences also the Latin comparative suffix -iōr- shows an intensifying meaning when occurring with adjectives: this corresponds to the previous value of the Indo-European suffix *-iōs-/*-ies-, from which Latin -iōr- derives (it obviously underwent rhota-cism). In origin, this suffix “has the function of intensifier, the function of sin-gling out one element among many as particularly characterized by the specific feature expressed by the adjective: the phrase mitior X originally meant some-thing like ‘X that is rather mild, particularly mild’ ” (Cuzzolin 2011: 593). However, to my knowledge, in Latin the use of intensifying -iōr- is not attested with nouns.

Finally, from a typological point of view, a well-known relationship exists between augmentativization and intensification. It is worth quoting from Bauer (1997: 538): “evaluative morphology has, as its core areas, diminutivisation and augmentativisation. [. . .] The term ‘evaluative morphology,’ however, seems also to allow for a wider reading than simply markers of size and positive or negative emotional affect, including such things as intensification and politeness or mod-esty, which in some languages use the same affixes as diminutives and/or aug-mentatives.” However, as pointed out by Grandi (2002), Latin, as well as Ancient Greek, does not have any “typical” augmentative suffix which may give rise to an intensification value.8

On the basis of what has been observed until now, if we want to explore the domain of nominal intensification in Latin, it appears that we should primarily investigate the field of intensifying adverbs, to which we turn in the next section.

3.1 Remarks on Latin intensifying adverbs in previous studies

It is well known that Latin adverbs may modify adjectives by implying intensifica-tion. In particular, there are many adverbs indicating a high degree or the highest degree of the quality that the adjective denotes. In Kühner and Stegmann (1955: 792) adverbs properly functioning as adjectival intensifiers, such as valde ‘very’ and magis ‘more’, are distinguished from quantifiers like multum ‘much’, multo ‘by far, much’, maxime ‘very much’, etc., which, however, can also imply intensi-

8 However, as remarked by Grandi (2002) himself, Latin has a productive derivational suffix, -(i)o, -(i)onis, which is mainly used with a pejorative meaning: it forms masculine animate nouns denoting human beings with a specific property (often a physical feature), or with the habit of doing something in an exaggerated way. As an example of the two categories, he quotes Lat. mento, -onis ‘person with protruding chin’ and ganeo, -onis ‘guzzler, a dissolute person’. Cf. also Gaide (1988).


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fication – as the authors themselves recognized (cf. also Pinkster 1972: 48–50; Cuzzolin 2011: 642; Gaide 2012: 70).9 In particular, as focused on by Cuzzolin (2011: 642), maxime (from maximus <*mag-som-os, the irregular superlative of magnus ‘big’) was “the regular adverb for the absolute superlative.”

Also adverbs primarily denoting manner, such as belle, bene, perfecte, vehe-menter, etc. (cf. Section 4.1), may have an intensifying meaning when referred to adjectives. Kühner and Stegmann (1955: 793) and Hofmann and Szantyr (1965: 171) assumed that the function of these adverbs as intensifiers is determined by the syntactic context (on this point, see Pinkster 1972: 58; Ricca 2010: 161; cf. also Section 4.1 in this paper).

As pointed out by Ricca (2010: 161–164), intensifying adverbs occurring as modifiers of adjectives may have different functions:10 apart from denoting the intensification of the gradable property signified by the adjective, they may be used to express the speaker’s/writer’s event-oriented evaluation. Obviously, in many cases the two functions cannot be separated, as illustrated by the following case:

(11) (Cic. Verr. II, 4, 148; Ricca 2010: 164) homo ridicule insanus ‘A man ridiculously foolish’

As is well known, apart from modifying adjectives, intensifying adverbs may modify other adverbs and prepositional phrases, which are functionally not far from adverbs when their semantics implies a notion of graduality (Ricca 2010: 166):

(12) (Cic. de orat. 2, 259, 8; Ricca 2010: 166–167) Si ad te bene ante lucem venisset ‘If he were to visit you well before daylight’

Scholars have recognized that Latin intensifying adverbs may occur with nominal bases. Recently, Ricca (2010) has commented on this possibility. According to him, adverbs are nonnominal modifiers by definition. However, he assumes that “from a functional perspective, it is not really problematic that the same adverbs

9 In this respect, Pinkster (1972: 53) pointed out that a semantic classification of Latin adverbs is quite problematic. 10 The reader is referred to the recent contribution by Ricca (2010) for a comprehensive survey of Latin adverbs. See Ricca (2010: 128) for the use of Latin intensifying adverbs with verbal predicates.



may also modify a noun, when it is used in a qualifying sense” (Ricca 2010: 167). Apart from the example quoted here as (2), another instance of this phenomenon is the following:

(13) (Cic. Verr. II, 2, 192; Ricca 2010: 167) At homo inertior, ignavior, magis vir inter mulieres, impura inter viros mu-

liercula proferri non potest ‘But a lazier man, a greater coward, a fellow who more than him plays the

man among women and the corrupted contemptible woman among men, can never be produced’

It is worth mentioning Ricca’s (2010) comment on this example:

It may be unclear which noun phrase is modified by magis (either uir alone or, more plausi-bly, the whole asyndetic phrase uir . . . muliercula). Neither solution, however, runs counter to the assumption that adverbs are nonnominal modifiers, since the noun phrase is clearly nonreferential: it is itself employed as a modifier, even a gradable one, as the coordination with the comparatives inertior and ignauior most explicitly shows. For such examples it is not necessary to speak of an attributive function of adverbs (as done in Kühner and Steg-mann [1955: 218–219]): the adverb acts, as usual, as an attributive modifier. It is a different matter in those instances where adverbs modify noun phrases used referentially. This be-havior would indeed be incompatible with the prototypical definition of adverbs. (Ricca 2010: 167)

In my opinion, it is equally plausible that magis modifies the noun phrase vir inter mulieres, rather than the whole asyndetic phrase vir . . . muliercula, as claimed by Ricca (2010). As regards the nonreferential value of both noun phrases, this obviously depends on which definition of referentiality one has in mind. In (13), vir inter mulieres functions as an apposition, and, in this respect, is certainly nonreferential. At the same time, it refers to a specific person, who really exists in the universe of discourse (which corresponds to the definition of referential noun). In other words, changing perspective, magis could appear as a nominal modifier here. However, a detailed discussion of this issue, which also involves the com-plex topic of the function of adverbs in Latin, is beyond the scope of the present paper.11

11 Ricca (2010: 168) also observes that referential noun phrases may be modified by the specific subclass of focusing adverbs/particles, like etiam ‘also’, solum ‘only’, praesertim ‘especially’, quidem ‘really, indeed’. However, he deliberately did not deal with them. As regards this specific set of forms, cf. Bertocchi (2001) on the scalar interpretation of modo ‘only’.


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4 Intensification of nouns in Latin: Plautus and Cicero

A comprehensive survey of the use of Latin intensifying adverbs with nouns is still lacking. For instance, in a recent chapter on intensifying adverbs in the Latin language by Gaide (2012), the author discusses their occurrence almost exclu-sively with adjectives and with other adverbs. Probably, this depends on the fact that intensifying adverbs are not frequently attested with nominal bases (cf. Sec-tion 4.1). However, it may be interesting to examine the extent to which this use is documented from Archaic and Classical Latin to Late Latin, beyond its frequency, which adverbs are preferentially selected with this specific function, and which kinds of nouns are modified (animate versus inanimate, referential versus nonreferential).

In this Section, I will present some preliminary findings on these issues and, more in general, on the phenomenon of intensification of nouns in Latin. In par-ticular, I will summarize the main results of the analysis of nominal intensifica-tion in a few of Plautus’ and Cicero’s works (cf. Section 1, and note 1). In investi-gating these texts, apart from adverbs typically occurring as intensifiers (Section 4.1), also other strategies of intensification have been taken into account, i.e., primarily, the use of adjectives (Section 4.2).

4.1 Adverbs with an intensifying functionThe present section summarizes the data pertaining to the use of intensifying adverbs with nominal bases which emerge from my analysis of texts by Plautus and Cicero. I have selected 14 adverbs which may show an intensifying interpre-tation when occurring with adjectives or verbs, by functioning as maximizers or as boosters in Paradis’ (2001, 2008) terms (cf. Section 2), and I have checked their occurrences as intensifiers of nouns. These adverbs are abunde ‘amply, fully, very’, belle ‘nicely, well’, bene ‘well, fittingly’, magis ‘to a greater extent, more’, maxime ‘to the greatest extent, most, very much’, multum ‘much, very’, nimis/nimium ‘too much, too’, perfecte ‘perfectly, totally, fully’, plane ‘plainly, clearly, utterly, absolutely’, pulchre ‘beautifully, fully, perfectly’, sic ‘thus, so, so much’, summe ‘in the highest degree, superlatively well, intensely’, valde ‘vigorously, powerfully, intensely, extremely’, vehementer ‘violently, strongly, immensely, tremendously’.12

12 As already mentioned, only the intensifying meaning of these adverbs is taken into account here, with the consequence that the quantifying function displayed by some of these forms is not considered.



As regards Plautus’ selected plays, these adverbs do not show any occurrence as nominal intensifiers. In Cicero’s texts examined, the only form among those chosen which intensifies nouns is plane. It properly belongs to the group of manner adverbs, whose intensifying function with adjectives is well known (cf. Section 3.1). Some examples are quoted below:

(14) (Cic. Tusc. 2, 53) At vero C. Marius, rusticanus vir, sed plane vir, cum secaretur, ut supra dixi,

principio vetuit se adligari. [. . .] Ita et tulit dolorem ut vir ‘But as a matter of fact C. Marius, a countryman by extraction, yet undoubt-

edly a man, when under the surgeon’s knife, as I related earlier, refused from the outset to be bound. [. . .] Thus being a man he bore pain’

(15) (Cic. de orat. 2, 32) Ergo id qui toto in genere fecerit is si non plane artem, at quasi artem quan-

dam invenerit . . . ‘Whence it follows that he who extends his survey over the whole province

of rhetoric, will discover that which, though not absolutely an art, yet wears the likeness of an art’

(16) (Cic. Att. 16, 11, 6) Romam veniet cum manu magna; sed est plane puer ‘And he [scil. Octavian] will go to Rome with a large following; but he is very

much a boy’

(17) (Cic. Att. 13, 46, 1) Pollex quidem, ut dixerat ad Id. Sext., ita mihi Lanuvi prid. Id. praesto fuit, sed

plane pollex, non index ‘Punctual to his promise to return by the Ides of August Pollex presented

himself to me at Lanuvium the day before, but a pollex indeed he proved, not an index’

The case in (14) is an instance of how a non-gradable noun may be coerced into a gradable use. Plane clearly has an intensifying value and expresses the writer’s subjective point of view on the man referred to: Marius is described as having all the positive (and stereotypical) qualities that make a man “a real vir”. In other words, he is “absolutely manly”, so manly to bear pain. Similarly, in (15), the oratory of skilled orators but without knowledge of rhetoric is presented by the orator Antonius as resembling an art, although it is not “a real ars” (i.e., a téchnē rhētorikē ).


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In my opinion, the case in (16) is slightly different: the adverb modifies the noun, although it does not have proper degree sense, which means that est plane puer cannot be paraphrased with something like ‘he is completely child-ish’. Plane rather strengthens and specifies the denotation of the noun by func-tioning as a non-scalar modifier (Paradis 2008: 333): est plane puer corresponds to something like ‘he is without any doubt a child’, as Octavian was because of his age, by emphasizing that he was a boy rather than a man.

Finally, the adverb is used in the same way in (17), where it is part of a word-play with reference to the fingers of a hand, the thumb ( pollex) and the index (index, literally ‘index’, but also ‘informer’).13 The noun phrases plane pollex and non index allude to the fact that the man about whom Cicero speaks, called Pollex, turns out to be entirely what his name predicts, ‘a pollex’: i.e., Pollex was not but a thumb, and he certainly was not a index finger, to be intended as ‘informer’.

It can also be noted that in its function as a nominal intensifier plane tends to occur before the modified noun. Compare the examples from (14) to (17) with the following case:

(18) (Cic. Att. 10, 11, 4) Trebatius erat mecum, vir plane et civis bonus ‘Trebatius is with me, a thoroughly good man and citizen’

In my opinion, it is not clear if in (18) plane is referred to the noun phrase vir et civis bonus, by properly modifying the adjective bonus (as the translation of the Loeb edition suggests), or if it modifies the noun vir alone, as seems plausible. If the last hypothesis is true, this would be the only case found in my corpus in which the adverb follows the noun that it intensifies.14

Two other cases should be mentioned concerning the use of bene and per-fecte, which, however, are not particularly relevant to the issue discussed here. First, the adverb bene occurs as a nominal modifier in Cicero, but it is added only to noun phrases or prepositional phrases with an adverbial temporal meaning

13 As rightly interpreted already by Lambertz, ThLL VII 1 1143, 9. Cf. Hor. sat. 2, 8, 26 Nomentanus ad hoc, qui, si quid forte lateret / indice mostraret digito: in commenting on these verses, Por-phyrio (Porph. Comm., ad locum) cites the Latin names of fingers as follows, i.e., pollex, index, famosus, medicus, minimus (cf. ThLL VII 1 1143, 11–14).14 Gualtiero Calboli (personal communication) has offered an interesting explanation for this postposition. In (18), the noun phrase civis bonus shows an unexpected word order, since the usual collocation of these two words corresponds to bonus civis (cf. ThLL III 1226, 2–8). Given that, it may be supposed that the postposition of the adverb plane reproduces the unusual post-position of the adjective bonus. In Calboli’s opinion, this could have been influenced by the spe-



(an example has already been quoted in this paper: ex. [12], Section 3; on the in-tensifying use of bene, cf. also Fruyt 2011b: 843). Second, the adverb perfecte occurs once as displayed below:

(19) (Cic. Tusc. 4, 38) His autem vacuus animus perfecte atque absolute beatos efficit ‘But when the soul is freed from such ailments, it renders men completely

and entirely happy’

In (19), beatos is the masculine plural accusative of an adjective functioning as a substantive (‘happy men’): here, perfecte and also absolute function as maximizers by emphasizing that a lack of happiness is entirely excluded in the situa-tion described. However, clearly enough, the degree reading of both adverbs is related to the intensification of the gradable quality denoted by the adjective, rather than to the intensification of the noun man.

4.2 Adjectives: degree and non-degree modification of nouns

If it is true that intensifying adverbs rarely function as nominal modifiers in Latin, one should ask how nouns are intensified in this language. The answer could appear obvious: by means of adjectives. However, Latin adjectives have not been systematically studied by taking into account their intensifying function, i.e., their use as nominal degree modifiers, and, obviously, this function has not been explored in the light of the recent debate on this topic.

In the literature, it has been recognized that degree adjectives may modify nouns which denote a gradable property in their lexical meaning: the function of such adjectives is to signal that this property holds at a high degree. Adjectives which are most often employed as intensifiers are those that evoke extremeness (Bolinger 1972: 149; Austerlitz 1991: 3; Paradis 2008: 255). They belong to different semantic groups, including, for instance, adjectives which denote (i) size (e.g., big, great, huge, enormous, etc.), (ii) strength (e.g., hearty, powerful, overpowering,

cial collocation of erat (erat mecum instead of mecum erat): as a result, mecum, plane and bonus are placed in the same position with respect to the verbal predicate. As Calboli also suggested to me, in Caesar an interesting case is found in which the connection between the nouns vir and civis has produced a similar postposition of the adjective (cf. ThLL II 2081.74–2082.29): Caes. civ. 3, 32, 3 qui horum quid acerbissime crudelissimeque fecerat, is et vir et civis optimus habebatur. Here, however, optimus clearly refers to both vir and civis and, therefore, could not be placed before civis.


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etc.), (iii), impact (e.g., astonishing, amazing, terrific, incredible, etc.), (iv) singu-larity (e.g., special, exceptional, unusual, etc.), (v) evaluation (e.g., bad, awful, terrible, fine, etc., often with an ironic nuance), (vi) purity and veracity (e.g., total, complete, perfect real, etc.).

The following English examples display size adjectives (more specifically, adjectives predicating bigness) used as nominal modifiers in attributive position and showing a degree reading:

(20) (Morzycki 2009: 176) a. George is an enormous idiot b. Gladys is a big stamp-collector

Evidently enough, the adjectives in (20) do not signify large physical size, but in-volve a high degree of the property referred to by the noun: in the first sentence, for instance, “it is George’s idiocy that is enormous, not George” (Morzycki 2009: 176). In other words, George can be described as very idiotic: this means that the relationship between the adjective and the modified noun appears to be equiva-lent to the relationship between an adverbial degree modifier and a gradable ad-jective (Constantinescu 2001: 161–162).

The same phenomenon is attested in different languages. For example, the following noun phrases may all be paraphrased as ‘someone who is very idiotic’, since they imply a degree reading:

(21) (Morzycki 2009: 176–177) Spanish un gran idiota a great idiot

(22) (Morzycki 2009: 176–177) Polish wielki idiota great idiot

(23) (Morzycki 2009: 176–177) German ein großer Idiot a big idiot

(24) (Morzycki 2009: 176–177) Modern Hebrew idyot gadol idiot big



I will briefly comment on the behavior of two Latin adjectives, i.e., magnus ‘big, vast’ and perfectus ‘complete, perfect’, beside their superlative forms, maximus and perfectissimus, respectively. Given the provisional character of this paper, in my opinion, the data discussed here demonstrate how interesting results can be obtained if Latin adjectives belonging to specific semantic groups are analyzed by looking at their (possible) intensifying function.

First of all, I shall compare the following occurrences of magnus:

(25) (Pl. Am. 1103) Sed puer ille quem ego lavi, ut magnust et multum valet! ‘But the boy I washed, how big and strong he is!’

(26) a. (Cic. Att. 7, 13a, 3) Labienus, vir mea sententia magnus, Teanum venit ‘Labienus, a great man in my opinion, arrived at Teanum’ b. (Cic. de orat. 1, 220) Quis enim umquam orator magnus et gravis . . . ‘For what grand and impressive speaker . . .’

In example (25), magnus shows its basic literal meaning: it describes somebody as being large in size, and, obviously, cannot be considered as an intensifier. The same adjective may occur to represent somebody as being ‘great in attainment or achievement, distinguished, skilled’, especially with nouns denoting activity or profession. This is the case of the two examples in (26), where magnus does not signify bigness in physical terms, but it is said of properties: in (26a), it designates a man with all the highest virile qualities (more specifically, military qualities, as can be inferred from the context);15 in (26b) it describes a highly skilled orator. On the basis of Bolinger’s (1972) approach, magnus does not have a degree meaning in both last cases, since it is accompanied by non-gradable nouns. In his opinion, to say that somebody is a big lawyer, for instance, implies that “he is well known as a lawyer”, which corresponds to a non-degree reading (Bolinger 1972: 146).

The use of magnus displayed in (26), which is quite frequent in Latin, rather resembles what Morzycki (2009: 183–184) labels the “expressive role” of size adjectives, exemplified in (27):

(27) (Morzycki 2009: 184) The big political figures of the 20th century . . .

15 Labienus was a soldier and, in particular, Caesar’s lieutenant in Gaul. Later, during the civil war, he joined the Pompeian side. Cicero writes to Atticus how Labienus’ arrival in Teanum, where he met Pompey and the consuls, brought great courage to their side.


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The expressive role of size adjectives corresponds to their use to “involve some notion of, very roughly, ‘significance’ [. . .]. Unlike degree readings, significance readings don’t involve degrees on a scale provided by the head noun (degrees of idiocy, of stamp-collector-hood, etc.). Rather, they always involve degrees of (something like) significance, irrespective of the noun” (Morzycki 2009: 183–184). This means that, when occurring under this interpretation, these adjectives may be used with non-gradable nouns, as in the Latin examples in (26) and in the English example in (27). In this case, obviously, it is the meaning of the adjective which implies a degree of significance, whereas the noun is unspecified in this respect.

Moreover, the expressive use of magnus illustrated in (26) may be considered as a bridge between the concrete meaning displayed by this adjective in (25), de-noting physical size, and the degree meaning that it seems to get in instances like those quoted below:

(28) (Pl. Am. 463–464) Bene prospereque hoc hodie operis processit mihi: amovi a foribus maxumam molestiam ‘The job went well and successfully for me today. I removed a terrible nuisance from the door’

(29) (Cic. Tusc. 1, 36) Quam eorum opinionem magni errores consecuti sunt, quos auxerunt poetae ‘This belief resulted in serious deceptions which poets exaggerated’

In (28) and (29), the function of maximus and magnus is to strengthen the nega-tive meaning already implied by the modified elements, which correspond to typically gradable nouns (Constantinescu 2011: 22), by measuring the property that they encode, and signifying, respectively, the highest grade and a high grade. In (28), the superlative maximus occurs with the nouns molestia, -ae ‘distress, discomfort, trouble’, in order to refer to a very annoying person, i.e., the person whom the speaker removed from the door. The sentence in (29) alludes to beliefs which are deceptive at a high degree.

A relevant case is also the following, where the noun crux, crucis (‘any wooden frame on which criminals are exposed to die, a cross’; ‘death by the cross’)16 is modified by the adjectives malus and magnus. As is well known, mul-

16 Crux often occurs in imprecations; moreover, it may be employed with the meaning of ‘anything which causes grief or annoyance, a plague, a torment’, as in the example quoted below (cf. ThLL IV 1258.84–1259.16):



tiple modification – for instance, by accumulation of modifiers – is typical of in-tensifying processes:

(30) (Pl. Men. 849) Ni a meis oculis apscedat in malam magnam crucem ‘In no way, unless she leaves my sight and goes to be hanged’

I shall consider now the case of perfectus. First of all, it should be mentioned that etymologically perfectus is the perfect participle of perficio, and corresponds to ‘accomplished, realized to the full extent’. However, it is lexicalized as a full adjective in Latin meaning ‘complete, perfect, absolute’, with a comparative and a superlative form (attested in prose since Varro, Cicero, and the Rethorica ad Herennium: cf. Reineke, ThLL X 1 1373.43–1382.34; see also ThLL X 1 1373.68: fere i.q. ad finem perductus, absolutus, plenus, nullius rei indigens).

English adjectives like absolute, perfect, etc., share the semantic content of completeness, from which they develop a reinforcing meaning and a degree meaning during the Early Modern period (see example [4a] in Section 2), and become maximizers (Paradis 2008: 335).17 As opposed to the case of magnus, to assume that the Latin adjective perfectus may be interpreted as denoting the com-plete degree would probably represent a projection of the standard analysis of its English counterpart. It seems that in Latin perfectus preserves its etymological, concrete, meaning of completeness, as in example (31), without getting a rein-forcing, intensifying, or emphasizing reading:

(31) (Cic. de orat. 1, 197) His ego de causis dixeram, Scaevola, eis, qui perfecti oratores esse vellent,

iuris civilis esse cognitionem necessariam ‘On these grounds, Scaevola, did I declare a knowledge of the common law

to be indispensable to such as sought to become complete orators’

Noun phrases including adjectives used as intensifiers commonly exhibit redun-dancy (Bolinger 1972: 153–159): to quote from Bolinger (1972: 154), “a perfect gen-

(i) (Pl., Aul. 631) Quae te mala crux agitat? ‘What grievance is driving you out of your mind?’

Clearly enough, mala has an intensifying value here, as well as in example (30).17 Cf. also Ghesquière and Davidse (2011) on the mechanisms of change leading to noun- intensifying uses of adjectives. On the behavior of perfect and perfectly as degree modifiers in English, cf. Athanasiadou (2007: 558–562).


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tleman is perfect, of course, in a sense: but one who is truly a gentleman already has this degree of perfection, and all that the addition of perfect accomplishes is to underscore it by repetition.” In the light of this observation, let us comment on the following Latin sentence:

(32) (Cic. Tusc. 2, 47, 14) Sed praesto est domina omnium et regina ratio, quae conixa per se et

progressa longius fit perfecta virtus ‘But reason, the mistress and queen of the world, stands close at hand and

mounting by her own strength and pressing onward she becomes perfect virtue’

We could say that, apparently, in (32) perfecta virtus is redundant: since the noun virtus, -tis ‘virtue’ has its degree of perfection by itself, perfecta virtus is, emphat-ically, a virtus which is ‘entirely virtuous’. However, this is a misinterpretation which does not correspond to the Latin state of affairs. At least in Classical Latin, perfectus does not seem to get an intensifying meaning: perfecta virtus is, simply, a virtus which has achieved its highest accomplishment, and, then, is ‘complete, perfect’. At the same time, cases like that in (32), where perfectus is added to abstract gradable nouns focusing on a single property, represent the conceptual basis from which a degree meaning could arise: it is with this kind of nouns that an adjective like perfectus may shift from the (more or less) concrete meaning of completeness to the function of strengthening the property denoted by the noun.18 From a diachronic point of view, it could be interesting to examine Late Latin texts in order to see whether they already attest an intensifying use of perfectus.

Finally, an adjectival form which seems to be used as an intensifier is quan-tus, which shifts from a quantifying function (especially as an interrogative form, meaning ‘of what size (amount, etc.)?’, ‘how great?’) to an intensifying function, mainly in exclamatory sentences:

(33) (Pl. Am. 104–107) Nam ego vos novisse credo iam ut sit pater meus, quam liber harum rerum multarum siet quantusque amator sit quod complacitum est semel

18 It is interesting to quote from ThLL X 1 1379.69–73: in vita publica, sc. in titulo onorifico vir –issimus. [. . .] A usu sollemni est titulus prius ordinis equestris, inde a saec. IV magistratuum quo-rundam vel aliorum honoratorum.



‘Well, I believe you already know what my father’s like, how liberal he is in many things of this sort, and what a great lover he is of anything that’s taken his fancy’

(34) (Cic. Tusc. 5, 103, 8) At quantus orator! ‘Ah! But how consummate an orator!’

In these cases, as in those illustrated in (26), the noun does not denote any scalar property, but the adjectival modifier evokes an external property or external prop-erties, inferable from the context and related to the semantics of the noun, which are measurable. What quantus seems to signal in these sentences is that the refer-ent of the noun is outstanding from the speaker’s/writer’s point of view, because of the noteworthy (unspecified) qualities that he possesses as a lover and as an orator, respectively. Moreover, the adjective implicitly suggests a comparison of the individual referred to by the noun with other individuals of the same type (if somebody is a great orator, orators who are not great should exist).

In other words, this use of quantus could be interpreted as corresponding to Constantinescu’s (2011) external intensification as is represented, for instance, by wh-exclamatives. As already seen in Section 2.1, the structure What a Noun may imply, under this kind of intensification, that the referent of the non-gradable noun corresponds to a remarkable, outstanding, noteworthy type of individual, characterized by an external property which is not explicitly mentioned and must be inferred from the context. This function seems to be similar to the function performed by quantus in (33) and (34).

5 Conclusion and further perspectiveIn the present contribution, I have tried to give a preliminary account of the phe-nomenon of intensification of nouns (conceived of as the strategy of scaling up-wards or downwards the properties referred to by a specific noun), by focusing on the expression of a high degree or the highest degree.

Previous studies have shown how in Latin adverbs having an intensifying meaning with adjectives may also be employed to intensify nouns, although not frequently. I have analyzed the behavior of 14 intensifying adverbs in six texts by Plautus and Cicero, by checking their occurrences as nominal intensifiers. As a result, in these texts, only one adverb, i.e., plane, is attested as an intensifier of nouns.

Moreover, my results point to the fact that certain adjectives may get an inten-sifying reading when used with nouns in Latin, and, at the same time, that nouns


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may be intensified independently of their being gradable or not, as happens in modern languages.

This paper corresponds, at best, to an initial step towards the understanding of intensification of nouns in Latin: this issue obviously requires further investi-gation, from a quantitative point of view (i.e., analysis of much more Latin data), and also from the perspective of a more insightful discussion of theoretical aspects.

To arrive at a proper understanding of nominal intensification in Latin as ex-pressed by means of adverbs, such adverbs must be classified on the basis of the type of intensification that they codify (primarily, quantitative and/or qualita-tive), and the restrictions on the available kinds of degree modification must be acknowledged. In particular, it could be interesting to include focusing adverbs/particles, the degree meaning of which has not been extensively examined in Latin (cf. note 11 in this paper).

As regards adjectives, many issues should be investigated concerning the possible semantic and syntactic restrictions on their use as intensifiers, e.g., which adjectives admit a degree interpretation and to what extent this interpreta-tion is possible, with which kinds of nouns and in which position (predicative and/or attributive) it arises, and, moreover, which specific nuances each adjec-tive acquires. In particular, which criteria allow us to distinguish between a “pure” qualifying reading and an intensifying reading? In general, elements which could be considered as diagnostic of intensification are the use with grad-able nouns, multiple modification (accumulation and recursivity), as well as the occurrence in context in which evaluation is clearly linked to subjectivity, in terms of the expression of the speaker’s perspective/viewpoint/attitude at an emotional level (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994; Atahnasiadou 2007). Thus, all these factors should be taken into account in the analysis of the intensifying meaning of adjectival forms.

The data examined in this study, in my opinion, warrant closer inspection of all these aspects, and, possibly, of other scenarios related to the phenomenon of intensification.

Acknowledgments: I am greatly indebted to the editors of the Journal of Latin Linguistics, Gualtiero Calboli and Pierluigi Cuzzolin, for insightful and valuable remarks on a previous version of this work. Gualtiero Calboli also invited me to submit this paper to JOLL: special thanks are due to him for this opportunity. I am grateful to Chiara Fedriani, Nicoletta Puddu and Francesco Rovai, who have helped me by kindly providing some bibliographical material. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments, and Monika



Wendland, Production Editor at Walter de Gruyter, for her useful advice during the last stage of the publication.

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some remarks on intensification of nouns in latin

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