ZERO-DEGREE INTENSIFIERS WITH SERBIAN AND ENGLISH COMPARATIVES

Abstract

While degree intensifiers marking minimum comparative degrees have been an inevitable topic in both grammatical and linguistic literature, the possibilities of using adverbs to signify the zero value appear to have been systematically avoided. This gap in the current literature served as a main motivation for this analysis. The paper aims at identifying and analyzing intensifiers used with comparatives by focusing solely on the adverbial lexemes which are used to signify the zero-degree, i.e. to cancel or nullify a comparative degree. The independent corpus analyses were conducted on annotated electronic corpora: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Korpus savremenog srpskog jezika (KSSJ). Englesko-srpski parelelni korpus (ESPK 2012) is used for demonstrating the observed similarities and differences. Based on the criteria introduced by Đorđević (2004), the contrastive analysis conducted here can be classified as an independent, theoretical, structural, and descriptive contrastive study. The findings prove that the lexical repertoires of both languages include adverbial devices used with comparatives which allevate comparative degree to the zero value. In addition, we can make a differentiation between two lexico-semantic sub-categories of such lexical devices: those signifying the absolute zero value and those marking the borderline, i.e. limitary values.