O strategie de gradare în limba română actuală

In the present chapter we will present a degree marking strategy, well represented in the colloquial register of present-day Romanian. We have identified several contexts that make up a multi-stage scenario of intensity marking: units that are originally nouns end up functioning as intensity markers of adjectives, then develop adjectival features. We will first trace the phases of this process of recategorization: the transition from nouns in false comparative constructions to invariable intensifiers and “adjectives”. We are interested in whether this is a real phenomenon of recategorization from noun to adjective (a phenomenon that would considerably enrich the class of invariable adjectives in the current Romanian language). We will also show how productive the phenomenon is in present-day Romanian, working on RoTenTen corpus of spoken Romanian.