0 a word, especially an adverb or adjective, that has little meaning itself but is used to add force to another adjective, verb, or adverb:
1 a word, esp. an adverb, that is used to add force to another word or phrase:
Those so labeled almost always use the term as an intensifier, not a philosophical label.
Table 5 shows the distribution of really as intensifier and as modal by these four speakers.
Middle-class speakers used suffixed forms in the adverb classes studied, including intensifiers, twice as frequently as working-class speakers.
We have also discovered an overriding constraint such that intensifiers are preferred with predicative adjectives, and this is true regardless of the intensifier.
In addition, the analysis also includes intensifiers, such as universal and negative pronouns (all, nothing), amplifiers (a lot, forever), and emphatics (extreme/-ly/, total/-ly/).
Rather, this use of taboo terms can appear anywhere the appropriate intensifiers can appear.
In the next section, we subject the incoming intensifier really to an analysis that treats both the internal and external factors simultaneously.
Extrapolating from these observations, use of intensifiers with predicate adjectives could be taken as evidence for a later stage in the delexicalization process.
