Translating intensifiers: (non-) equivalences across English and Italian

Adverbial intensifiers like English very, deeply and absolutely and Italian molto, profondamente and assolutamente express the semantic role of degree. They are also modal, speaker oriented adverbs, text structuring devices and local vehicles for speech act modification. In view of their enormous variety and subtle differences in use within and across languages, this paper sets out to investigate equivalences in translation between English and Italian intensifiers and predicate-intensifier collocations. Crucially, due attention will be given to intensifiers as expressions of speaker’s attitudes and evaluations and, hence, to connotational and pragmatic equivalences between source and target language at the micro-textual level.