On Intensifiers in Thai and Korean: Grammaticalization and Contrastive Perspectives

Intensification is a language universal (Rainer, 2015, p. 1340) since adding emphasis to the meaning of a particular linguistic form is among language users’ basic needs in discourse. Intensification is frequently realized by means of an intensifier, a degree-modifying adverb in many languages. Despite the universal presence of intensifiers across world languages, their morpho-syntactic makeup and lexical strengths may vary (Hendrikx et al., 2024). This paper utilizes a comparative perspective to analyze intensifiers in two languages that are typologically distinct and genealogically unrelated, i.e., Korean and Thai, and reveals that Thai has fewer items with a much higher level of specialization as compared to Korean, reinforcing the claim that Thai uses the polysemy strategy whereas Korean uses the monosemy strategy (Khammee & Rhee, 2022). It further reveals that, unlike Korean, in which diverse source lexemes are involved, Thai intensifiers are built on a more restrictive number of lexemes, utilizing the primary marker complemented with particles, lexical items, or even reduplication. Korean intensifiers are sometimes used in repetitive forms but univerbation of such forms is rather rare. The present paper also presents a number of intriguing aspects of grammaticalization and lexicalization that may be attributed to typological and idiosyncratic differences between the two languages.