Open AccessCompromiser - a notional paradigm
Author(s) -
Carita Paradis
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
hermes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.759
H-Index - 7
eISSN - 1903-1785
pISSN - 0904-1699
DOI - 10.7146/hjlcb.v7i13.25081
Subject(s) - syntagmatic analysis , notional amount , degree (music) , linguistics , selection (genetic algorithm) , lexical item , trait , semantic change , lexical semantics , psychology , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , philosophy , physics , finance , acoustics , economics , programming language
On the basis of an investigation of the lexical forms quite, rather, fairly, and pretty in contemporary spoken British English, I postulate that these lexical items form a notional paradigm of compromiser within the category of degree modifiers. Compromisers are cognitive synonyms that occupy the middle of an abstract intensity scale, approximating a mean degree of another word, eg quite / rather / fairly / pretty dirty. They are all polysemous and poly-functional words, whose meanings are determined by a crucial semantic trait ‘to a moderate degree’ on the paradigmatic axis, and by a semantic-syntactic, selection-licensing mechanism on the syntagmatic axis.