"Drawing on a rich bank of data from the Old Bailey Corpus, this groundbreaking book provides the first full study of intensifiers in Late Modern English. It shows how usage varies for a wide variety of reasons, making it essential reading for scholars and advanced students in English historical linguistics"--

Claudia Claridge is Chair of English Linguistics, University of Augsburg, Germany. She specializes in historical discourse linguistics and (historical) pragmatics. She is the author of Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English (2000) and Hyperbole in English (2011).

1. Introduction: pleading the case; 2. Theoretical and methodological considerations; 3. Intensifiers: forms, features, and functions; 4. Corpus methodology and overview of data; 5. Maximizers; 6. Boosters; 7. Downtoners; 8. Multivariate analysis: intensifiers in a bird's-eye view; 9. Intensifiers across time; 10. The pragmatics of intensifiers; 11. The sociolinguistics of intensifiers; 12. Conclusion: summing up the evidence; Appendices.