How many socks are there in a (completely) empty drawer, or on the relation between borderline intensity and maximizers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12797/LV.21.2026.42.11Keywords:
maximizers, pragmatic halos, closed-scale adjectives, distinctive collexeme analysisAbstract
The paper describes the problem of seemingly redundant collocations of Polish maximizers (e.g., całkowicie, zupełnie ‘completely’) with the adjective pusty ‘empty’. The adjective itself denotes borderline intensity, so modification by the maximizer seems unnecessary. However, this combination is acceptable and quite common. Corpus methods were used to address the difference between contexts in which, despite this superficial redundancy, the maximizer appears alongside the adjective pusty and those where it does not. Distinctive collexeme analysis examined the differences between nouns in the constructions: maximizer + pusty + noun and ¬ maximizer + pusty + noun. The study revealed that maximizers appear especially when describing empty public spaces and containers with many elements, but do not appear with smaller containers with few elements or in figurative usage. This suggests that the maximizers in the contexts studied serve to exclude the implied possibility of imprecise usage of the adjective pusty.
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