Elative Compounds

Abstract

Elative compounds, also known as intensifier compounds, serve to intensify scalar adjectives in an idiomatic and often colourful way. They may give rise to prefixoids by analogical extension. Several semantic subtypes are distinguished: (i) simile‐based compounds ( rock hard = hard as a rock ), (ii) resultative compounds (German sterbenslangweilig ‘die‐boring = boring to death’ and (iii) taboo‐based compounds (Dutch pisnijdig ‘piss angry’). Elative compounds are extreme adjectives, a class of adjectives associated with extremes of a scale, much like non‐compound adjectives such as gorgeous, magnificent, fantastic . When there are several elative compounds of an adjective, the compounds are semantically more specialized than the adjective (and so serve to disambiguate polysemy) and are differentiated in the constructions in which they appear. Elative compounds may undergo further derivation, but they rarely do so. A possible link is proposed with the extreme adjective status of elative compounds. Throughout this entry, comparisons are made between elative compounding and other ways to intensify adjectives.