This study deals with the emphasizing use of adjective pure, as in pure heaven, pure unbridled hell, which heightens the semantic specifications of the following nominal description. On the basis of close analysis of synchronic and diachronic data, it is argued that the peculiarities of Present-day emphasizer pure are the result of two distinct but mutually reinforcing paths of development. Emphasizing pure first appeared as a subjective heightener of emotion nouns in the syntactic environment pure + noun, in which it subsequently spread to other collocational sets. The contextual emphasizing use, e.g. in pure spirit, seems to have been a facilitating factor in this process. In the pattern pure and adjective + noun, the emphasizing use cropped up only at the end of Late Modern English as the result of leftward movement and subjectification (Adamson 2000), enabled by contextual modulation of pure by the other adjective. These two paths were linked by shared collocational sets such as the emotion nouns.

This study deals with the emphasizing use of adjectivepure, as inpure heaven,pure unbridled hell, which heightens the semantic specifications of the following nominal description. On the basis of close analysis of synchronic and diachronic data, it is argued that the peculiarities of Present-day emphasizerpureare the result of two distinct but mutually reinforcing paths of development. Emphasizingpurefirst appeared as a subjective heightener of emotion nouns in the syntactic environmentpure+ noun, in which it subsequently spread to other collocational sets. The contextual emphasizing use, e.g.in pure spirit, seems to have been a facilitating factor in this process. In the patternpureand adjective + noun, the emphasizing use cropped up only at the end of Late Modern English as the result of leftward movement and subjectification (Adamson 2000), enabled by contextual modulation ofpureby the other adjective. These two paths were linked by shared collocational sets such as the emotion nouns.

No abstract

In both English and Dutch, the adjective “pure/puur” has developed subjectified meanings, denoting speaker involvement rather than lexical unmixedness, as in the reinforcing “pure madness/pure waanzin”. “Pure/puur” can also express focusing discourse-structuring functions (“That’s pure luck/Da’s puur geluk”) and submodifier-of-classifier uses (“a pure economic measure/een puur economische maatregel”), structuring local discourse along precise subclassifications.This synchronic comparative study aims at describing these uses and at finetuning the analytical apparatus on which current accounts are based. Specific research questions are: what patterns do “pure/puur” engage in and what are their lexicosyntactic properties? What parameters explain distributional similarities? And how do these findings fit in with hypotheses about the unidirectionality of subjectification and the accompanying leftward movement in the NP?