Abstract
The thesis consists of two parts, a theoretical and an analysis part. Part 1 discusses the idea of intensification, focusing on five English amplifiers: absolutely, completely, entirely, perfectly, and totally. A few ideas on translation and a short chapter on intensification in Norwegian are also included in this part.
Part 2 discusses the five English amplifiers mentioned before in texts from the ENPC (English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus). The search in the ENPC was made in both directions (English and Norwegian) on absolutely, completely, entirely, perfectly, and totally; it came up with 462 cases of amplifiers, which made up the database of this study.
The results of this search show that completely is the most frequently used of the five amplifiers, and that it is followed in number of frequency by entirely, perfectly, absolutely, and totally.
In analysing the amplifiers I started from the premise that the modified words must trigger the use of the different Norwegian correspondences of our amplifiers. Consequently I considered the grammatical category of the words they modify and some semantical traits of these collocations. Some conclusions we may draw are:
o Perfectly modifies most adjectives and adverbs of our amplifiers, and entirely modifies most verbs;
o Absolutely is the only one of the maximizers discussed which modifies indefinite pronouns;
o The five amplifiers discussed are more frequently used in translated English texts than in original ones. They are rendered either by a paraphrase or a zero correspondence in the original Norwegian texts;
o The most frequently used Norwegian correspondences of our amplifiers are helt and fullstendig except for absolutely, whose most frequent correspondence is absolutt;
o Whenever our amplifiers modify adjectives, their Norwegian correspondence would be either helt or no correspondence. Since most of the cases of zero correspondence occur in translated English texts, we may conclude that the necessity of intensifying in English is mostly triggered by the modified adjectives;
o From a semantic point of view, the adjectives modified by our amplifiers are mainly adjectives of relevance. However some amplifiers may distinguish themselves by modifying other adjective types. The verbs modified by our amplifiers are mainly dynamic. However perfectly modifies almost as many stative as dynamic verbs. The modified verbs often also have a [+NEGATIVE] semantic feature, especially the ones that collocate with absolutely, completely, and entirely.