From adverb to intensifier : Corpus-based research in diachronic linguistics on the example of the Polish words okrutnie (‘cruelly’), strasznie (‘terribly’) and szalenie (‘madly’)

This paper aims is to analyse the status of selected Polish words: okrutnie (‘cruelly’), strasznie (‘terribly’) and szalenie (‘madly’). These units are traditionally considered to be adverbs, and their formal structure and original meaning indicate derivation from proper adjectives. We presume that adverbs might develop into intensifiers, which are semantically close to bardzo (‘very’). By analysing the linguistic material extracted from chronologically differentiated corpora of Polish (korba, kf19 and nkjp), we want to show how this linguistic process has been evolving over the centuries. Our research examines quantitative and qualitative collocational data of okrutnie, strasznie and szalenie with their categorical value and semantic evaluation (positive, neutral and negative). Our research reveals that the changing of words’ meaning, and their syntactic function, switched from the object language to the metalanguage level, is a feature associated with grammaticalization. We used a statistical chi-square test to verify the probability of word co-occurrence.