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Stefania Biscetti (Siena) |
This
paper outlines the diachronic development of the intensifier bloody,
whose syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties mark it as an atypical
member of its category.
Bloody belongs to a
highly individual set of pragmatically similar items (such as blooming,
damn, fucking) which do not follow the normal ‘rules’ regarding syntactic
range.
Unlike
a number of intensifiers
(such as very, extremely and absolutely) which lost their
independent lexical content of modality and reduced their syntagmatic
variabiliy, semantic bleaching did not yield syntactic rigidity for bloody.
In fact, bloody has acquired greater syntactic flexibility through time,
and is even present in tmesis (e.g., abso-bloody-lutely, also wrongly
called "infixation").
The
reason of such divergence is that while other intensifiers underwent
grammaticalization and developed their intensifying function from an original
modal one, bloody developed its intensifying function from a modal one, but it was born as an intensifier,
as shown by the earliest record of bloody
(adv.) in the OED (“Not without he will promise to be bloody
drunk.” (Etheredge, 1676)) and by its late attestation as a verbal adverbial
(You bloody know you didn’t (1953)). Its shift was from lexico-pragmatic
intensifier to pragmatic focus marker.
It will also be
shown that in the case of bloody pragmatic meaning favoured semantic
bleaching and that bloody’s pragmatic strengthening did not coincide
with stronger subjectification (in Traugott’s (1989) sense).