Often classifying adjectives (electric light; plenary meeting) do not allow intensification or grading. If they are graded by an intensifying modifier, they are often made gradable.

(Cf.QUIRK et al 1989: John is more English than the English, 470; COBUILD Grammar: Kashmir is largely muslim state, 1990, 95.)

BOLINGER has found a nice metaphor for this phenomenon and speaks of the general tendency of all colorful adverbs to be swept through the intensive gate. (1972, 53)

What is unnaturally long is so long that it seems unnatural, given a conventional or personal scale of measurement. It is this subjective or even ideosyncratic judgment according to an underlying scale which adds the speaker's attitude to the statement and which explains QUIRK et al's classification of expressions like unnaturally long as disjunct adverbs (cf.1998, 448). This overlap of qualification and intensification is also reflected in VERMEIRE's subclass of qualifying degree adverbs, i.e. manner adverbs with an inherent intensity feature. (1979,46, quoted in PETERS 1993)

The interrelation of the semantic categories and the ease with which we see the same adverbial expressing one or another (or more than one simultaneously) is not, of course, a weakness but rather one of the great sources of the adverbial's communicative strength." (QUIRK et al 1989, 486)

The material

The following usage profiles of a few selected adverbs of degree are the result of work with COBUILDDirect, the on-line service providing access to a 50 million word selection from the Bank of English. For the purposes of this study, the British English subcorpora were chosen. At the time of access to the corpus, these were:

UKBOOKS: books of fiction and non-fiction, published in Britain, mainly post-1990. 5 million words.


UKMAGS: periodicals such as magazines, newspapers, general/specialist interest publications. 5 million words


UKEPHEM: junk mail, leaflets, newsletters, personal letters ... 3 million words.


TIMES: issues of the Times and Sunday Times. 5 million words.


BBC: transcripts from broadcasts of the BBC World Service. 3 million words.


UKSPOKEN: informal, largely spontaneous conversations, phone calls, lectures, interviews ... 10 million words.

Texts of altogether 31 million words were analysed with the help of COBUILDDirect Concordance Program. The collocations are presented in a form that may remind the reader more of the classical dictionary citation than a concordance line. The reason for this is that for the presentation in this study I did not use an equal span of e.g. say five or ten words to the left and right of the search-word, but I chose as much collocating context as I thought necessary to ensure comprehension. The application of this principle has led to differing lengths of the collocations quoted.

The final selection of the individual adverbs for analysis followed some loose principles. One was that they are all contained in KIRCHNER's list of "Gradadverbien", which he had published in 1955. Those which were finally chosen are all commented on by KIRCHNER as being in the process of transition from adverbs of Manner to adverbs of DEGREE. The idea was to find out whether after 50 years of language development, KIRCHNER's predictions can be verified or not. As Gustav KIRCHNER was one of my academic teachers at Jena University, I am perhaps more than only academically interested in this subject.

The findings

1) MILD/MILDLY

The following figures give the number of MILD/MILDLY collocational types. The number of collocational tokens has been disregarded. They would be of interest for a textual analysis rather than a discussion of the intensifying potential of MILD/MILDLY.

Taking the adjective as the starting-point, a division can be made between the collocational SETs 1-4 (mainly indicating QUALITY DESCRIPTION, for details see below) and SETs 5-7 (DEGREE as a predominant meaning element).

SET 8 only records adverbial use in MANNER meaning syntactically functioning as adjuncts and disjuncts.

The total adjectival use of MILD with 149 types in the collocational SETS 1-4 clearly exceeds the total adverbial use of 8 types within these SETs. (18.6:1)

The total adjectival use of MILD in the collocational SETs 5-7 shows a different proportion if related to the corresponding adverb. With 117 adjective types : 58 adverb types (= 2:1), the adverb in these SETs is significantly more frequent than in the 1-4 SETs, with salient differences between the subcorpora.

The proportion is even more in favour of adverbs if only SETs 6 and 7 are considered: 58 adjectival types : 55 adverbial types (1:1).

The reason for excluding SET 5 here is that MILDLY (with reference to the seriousness of diseases and their symptoms, cf. appendix) does not behave in the same way as SETs 6 and 7. The use of MILDLY in 6 is extremely rare (three adverbial collocational types only as compared to 62 adjectival ones):

In addition, the productivity of this SET seems to be further restricted to the specialist language of medical science.

The only examples of MILDLY closer to DEGREE in meaning than MANNER that OED 1992 gives also belongs to this SET:

1899 Allbutt's Syst. Med. VII. 681 The patient became mildly demented.

Taking into account the closely related meaning concepts of SETs 6 and 7, one can hypothesize that MILDLY in its function of indicating the intensity, degree or range of such qualities that are not connected with the conventional referential domains of the adjective MILD (food, weather, colours, manners, illnesses) is most frequent.

In other words, the development of MILDLY as an adverb of degree utilizes an inherent meaning element that is differently prominent in the various collocational SETs. In doing so it moves away from the more concrete, quality-descriptive usage of the adjective MILD. The gain of the potential to express abstract DEGREE is paid for by the loss of the potential to express concrete QUALITY. Mildly as a degree adverb is the result of a delexicalization process.

Another general conclusion is that MILD/MILDLY obviously is much less an item of the spoken than the written language:

The nature of the spoken language of the BBC recordings (news, current affairs and general interest programmes) relativizes the figures concerning the spoken language even more.

The sparse use of MILDLY in the spoken language supports BORST's assumption that in everyday speech (which at the time he called the language of "the common people" 1902,3) little need is felt for more subtle differentiation of degrees. Other collocations containing degree adverbs of the type "high/low degree (+ expressive intensifications)" are much more strongly represented in ukspoken than MILDLY:

All findings taken together, the usage profile of MILDLY can perhaps be best described as predominantly expressing a degree meaning. This usage becomes more likely, the more MILDLY is used in semantic neighbourhoods other than those indicating the manner in which phenomena such as taste, substance, colour, weather, and personality are qualified.

Semantically, the usage of MILDLY as an adverb of DEGREE is focused on

1. collocational contexts referring to emotional, mental or cognitive states or actions, largely excluding reference to illnesses
   
2. a wide range of semantically unrelated, gradable states or actions.
   

The usage of MILD/MILDLY in its various collocational SETs

SET 1 (reference to food, medicine, cosmetics ...)

The collocations of this SET (both with the adjective and the adverb) show a certain overlap of the DEGREE and the QUALITY DESCRIPTION/MANNER concepts, although not equally strong in all cases. In its reference to food, medicine, cosmetics etc the adjective seems to be primarily quality-descriptive.

If quoted as one quality besides several others, MILD can easily take a medium position on an intensity scale. In such cases, a very strong element of DEGREE is added.

Referring to food, medicine, cosmetics etc, the adverb MILDLY is rarely used in situations which clearly allow the reading of MANNER.

The interpretation as "cured and smoked in a mild manner" rather than "cured and smoked to some slight degree" appears to be more sensible. (Wouldn't meat that is cured to some degree only be likely to rot? Different users, however, may apply different interpretations.) Also

is ambiguous and can finally be interpreted adequately only by the cook herself: Did she use mild spices (such as oregano) or not too much pepper?

With MILD, we frequently find recursive modification of a noun head.

The parallel use of MILD with another quality-descriptive adjective leads to the exclusion of the DEGREE meaning element. In this case, a particular meaning and a particular structure go very closely together. Interestingly, the six subcorpora only have one example of this recursive use of MILDLY:

Also here, the co-occurrence of MILDLY with pensively heavily supports the reading of MILDLY as expressing MANNER and not DEGREE.

Whereas QUALITY DESCRIPTIONI is quite common for adjectives of SET 1, the majority of cases of the adverb MILDLY shows that the DEGREE concept is more prominent here.

Notice the parallel use of slightly and mildly and it repercussions on the meaning of mildly.

Any statement about the presence or the absence of the one or the other concept should be made with caution. It should again be recognized that different users are likely to give different interpretations of what they feel dominates. This seeming lack of clarity may be of interest to the stylistician, practically it is irrelevant for communicative purposes, if not even an advantage. The highest degree of disambiguity is not necessarily what speakers wish to achieve. Rather, the efficacy of the expression is based on the double association that let's say the dish is both mild and to some degree piquant: mildly piquant.

Replacing mildly by an expression such as slightly/a bit/weakly would lead to the loss of the implicit meaning element of QUALITY DESCRIPTION in the degree adverb mildly. What offers itself more readily as a synonym is the equally positively connotated pleasantly piquant.

For (one of) the core meaning(s) of MILD (describing the quality of softness, soothingness of food, medicine, cosmetics etc.) we can tentatively summarize that the degree adverb MILDLY has not yet reached a high level of delexicalization. The specific collocational environments of MILDLY in such contexts help to retain traces of the core meaning even if the adverb is used predominantly with DEGREE function.

SETs 2 and 4 (reference to weather, colours, sounds ...)

In spite of the high frequency of the adjective in the six subcorpora in the SETs 2 and 4 (53) there are no occurrences of MILDLY SET 2 in any meaning and only one in SET 4:

Although a collocation such as was raining mildly could potentially be formed, there are obviously usage restrictions against this use of MILDLY in our corpora. How generally these restrictions operate would have to be shown by means of a larger or different corpus.

SET 3 (reference to manners or personality features)

It is again striking that there is not a single case of adverbial use in this SET. There are, however, altogether 20 tokens of the type mild-mannered/mild mannered in the corpora.

SET 5 (reference to diseases)

Taking into account the strong potential of MILD in SET 5 to express a point on an intensity scale, the noticeable absence of MILDLY in DEGREE meaning comes as a surprise (for the few examples see above). There is no language-internal reason to be seen why modified nouns such as mild indigestion, mild depression, mild hallucination, mild contractions, mild fatigue, mild addictions, mild handicaps, mild shock conditions etc. should not have one single verb-adjunct counterpart in the whole corpus.

Two explanations are possible. One is that the specifics of the text-type we find represented in the corpus seem to require a predominantly nominal style. The three examples

are an indication of the technical nature of the language used. It is left to be shown if texts of say narrative character would give more space to adverbial collocations of SET 6. On the other hand the lack of findings for MILDLY in the function of indicating DEGREE is actually in line with our hypothesis stated before: MILDLY in its function of indicating intensity, degree or range is most frequent if used to modify such qualities that are not connected with the conventional referential domains of the adjective MILD (food, weather, colours, manners, illnesses).

SETs 6 and 7

These two SETs show the largest number of occurrences of both MILD and MILDLY. If the fact is added that with SET 7 we have an onomasiologically unlimited range of qualities, phenomena or activities that can be modified by the use of MILD/MILDLY, it becomes evident that the intensity/degree-indicating potential of our node-word is very productive and is its major form of occurrence.

It is obvious that for expressions to be intensified or graded these have to be gradable. All expressions modified in this way share the semantic feature of gradability.

Gradability is, however, not the only meaning element contained. Associations of the mildness of the underlying process are reported to be present in some speakers' minds and "connotate" the DEGREE meaning. There is again overlap of concepts. This can be shown if "pure" intensifiers replace MILD/MILDLY, which leaves certain connotative features unexpressed:

In these examples, the process of delexicalization is by no means complete. Various meaning elements are interrelated, each contributing to the communicative force of the item in question.

There are also instances of the use of MILD/MILDLY where any connotation of softness, soothingness or gentleness seems to be ruled out by the very nature of the modified element (mild bombardment; mildly stirring acid ocean; mild panic). On looking more closely, however, at the larger context, thesource, the text-type, the writer's possible communicative intention, you find the writer must have been aware of the estrangement effect of the metaphorical use of the item (inverted commas; special register conventions; ironic distancing).

Such examples are another proof of the productivity and communicative strength of MILD/MILDLY's intensifying function.

In its co-occurrence with extremely, MILDLY loses most of its MANNER associations:

There are further collocations which show that the potential to express DEGREE can be utilised without drawing on the conventional meaning elements of QUALITY DESCRIPTION/MANNER. This is especially the case when the modified element hardly seems to contain any meaning element that would seem to be compatible with the QUALITY DESCRIPTION of MILD or the MANNER meaning of MILDLY.

In terms of meaning, there is a long way from a mild shampoo, a mild man, or mildly-toned report to a mildly corked bottle or to being mildly piqued by the vulgarity of the boss' strategy.

SET 8 (reference to the MANNER in which processes happen)

On the scale from definitely MANNER in meaning to a clear DEGREE meaning, SET 8 provides the largest number of examples of the first although also here the overlap reported for the other SETs is not totally absent.

At least the last two examples are likely to be interpreted as containing a certain DEGREE element.

Taking the semantic load of reprimand, rebuke and also complain into consideration, these processes can be seen as gradable, whereas saying, arguing, looking, pointing out are definitely not. A soon as the verb meaning allows gradability, the intensifier MILDLY tends to take on DEGREE meaning. With nongradable verbs we register MANNER adjuncts.

Quirk et al. report rather subtle cases of nongradable verbs becoming "gradable when the focus is on the result of the process rather than on the process itself [...] He drank up his beer completely" (1989, 595). With the last two examples above we have at least two candidates for verbs that can be made gradable in appropriate collocational contexts. DEGREE is again associated with MANNER (or vice versa).

The rest of the examples of SET 8 are clearly adjuncts of MANNER. to put it mildly (with overlapping MANNER and DEGREE meanings) expresses a comment on how the utterance is worded and is used as a standard phrase in disjunct function.

For the transition of MILDLY from an adverb of manner to an adverb of degree it can be stated that various different processes are at work in the polysemous lexical item: the blending of DEGREE with QUALITY DESCRIPTION/MANNER, metaphorization, the loss of original meaning components, the embedding in semantically almost unlimited collocational sets, all of which finally leads to the delexicalized means of expressing a certain point on a scale of intensity.

2) SAD/SADLY

The COBUILDDirect corpora findings were ordered in four (for SAD) and three (for SADLY) collocational sets (see appendix). The general survey shows an uneven distribution of the SAD/SADLY collocational types over the different SETs.

1. uses going beyond the original reference to an emotional state of mind are in no way exceptional, neither in SAD nor in SADLY
   

2. in terms of tokens, SADLY has the highest frequency
   

3. with only three types of SET 3 SADLY in ukspoken and only two in BBC, the use of the DEGREE adverb SADLY can be considered as being more or less restricted to the written medium.

Both ajectival SET 3 and adverbial SET 3 show a considerable distance in meaning from the original semantic content of SAD/SADLY (ie referring to the emotional state of "unhappiness", "sorrowfulness").

Examples SET 3 SAD:

In the adjective, we find the concept of "sadness" complemented or even outweighed by the less emotional, more rational negative descriptive labels "unsatisfactory" or "regrettable" or even "shabby". The link to rational thought can be explicitly indicated (cf.proof, because, reasons).

More important even, many uses of SAD in SET 3 show the tendency of grading, which the uses in other SETs do not. Rather, SETs 1 and 4 tend to add related or opposite descriptive adjectives to the immediate collocational range of SAD, thus strengthening the emotional character of the statements.

The grading is as clearly present in the SET 3 samples as it is vague in its reference. What is expressed in e.g. 'What a sad anticlimax!' is no more (but also no less) than that of all possible anticlimaxes, the one in question is situated rather low on an implicit scale the speaker presupposes the hearer will share with him/her: so low that it is already sad.

Examples SETs 1, 2, 4 SAD:

The collocational range of SET 3 SADLY, i.e. the DEGREE adverb, shows expressions of "need" or "want", but no restriction to "negative" collocates is noticeable. This observation had already been made by KIRCHNER 1955 (66).

This wide range of semantically unrelated expressions amongst the collocates and especially the loss of the original MANNER meaning in favour of DEGREE in some uses of SADLY point to the fact that the grammaticalization process is well advanced. This view is also supported by the fact that SADLY is almost stereotyped in collocations with lack and miss.

This finding goes beyond what OED 1992 contains. It does not explicitly record a DEGREE meaning of SADLY. Together with other examples that indicate MANNER, a few examples are listed in which intensification is at least as strongly represented as MANNER:

/Footnote: This interpretation is shared by PETERS 1993, 200/

WARM/WARMLY

The COBUILDDirect corpora findings were ordered in five (for WARM) and four (for WARMLY) collocational sets (see appendix). The bulk of the over 2,000 occurrences (tokens) of WARM exemplify

the core meaning with reference to temperature and

1. the figurative use with reference to "friendliness, warmheartedness".
   

What can be taken as the starting-point of a DEGREE meaning is such few cases which have been tentatively classified under 4 ("lively, passionate") and in which WARM as "friendly" is supplemented or occasionally perhaps even dominated by the intensifying meaning element "passionate" or "strong":

The transition between the subtle meaning differences is fluid. Even the same collocation can stress either the "friendly" or the "strong" meaning shade of WARM differently in different contexts. Whereas in the example Brokers gave a warm response to full-year figures the emphasis is obviously on their enthusiasm and on how much response the brokers gave, in other contexts the focus seems to be more on the warmheartedness:

Enumeration of related or synonymous qualities helps to distinguish between otherwise easily overlapping meanings:

Though WARM could not be found to take the meaning of a full-fledged adjective of DEGREE, it has at least a potential of being used with an intensifying connotation.

Various uses of WARMLY exploit this potential. WARMLY, apart from its uses with reference to temperature and colour, light and sounds (SETs 1 and 3) is relatively rare: There are no occurrences at all in the ukspoken subcorpus, only 21 types of SET 2 ("in a friendly, cordial manner") and 14 types of SET 4 ("intensively, strongly"), with fuzzy borderlines between them.

In some cases, the quality-description ("in a friendly manner") is closely linked with the presuppostion of a relatively high quantity of the gradable phenomenon or activity: How warm applause is will first of all be measured in quantities (of the time, of the degree of loudness ...): friendly, welcoming because strong and continuous.

The closeness of DEGREE indications to the original quality-descriptive function of WARMLY can be stated for the cases of word-play found in the corpus. The two meaning elements are obviously sufficiently active and alive for the user to mix them and partly de-metaphorize them for stylistic effects.

Some examples very clearly prove that WARMLY is indeed used as an adverb of DEGREE.

The corpus findings are, however, not so richly varied as the OED citations to which thwy were compared. Although again, as was the case with SADLY and MILDLY, no DEGREE meanings are explicitly defined, there are several examples that very strongly indicate a degree of intensification in WARMLY not found in the COBUILDDirect corpora.

Fervently, earnestly.

With controversial ardour, eagerly.

With warmth of temper.

With reference to attack or defence: Fiercely, vigorously.

It seems as if the English of the 17th to 19th century made use of intensifying WARMLY to a larger extent than is usual today. Interestingly, the collocational type receive warmly appears in 10 tokens in the corpora, but - contrary to all receive-citations in the OED - these are exclusively positively connotated.

Judging from today's perspective, KIRCHNER's prediction concerning WARMLY ("Dies Modaladv. geht in ein Intensivum über." 1955, 84) has failed to prove true. Intensifying WARMLY seems to be on the retreat rather than follow the trend of delexicalization. A larger corpus and one allowing for a historical dimension would be necessary to verify the hypothesis of a delexicalization process of WARMLY as a degree adverb.

Summary

In English studies, linguistic description has repeatedly been centred on the richness of expression for the meaning concept of DEGREE. The interest is motivated by the fact that this class of expressions is open to constant change and addition. The study reports on research into such DEGREE adverbs ending in -ly (disregarding other lexical and phrasal sets of intensifiers, rhetorical figures or syntactic structures) that orginally denoted MANNER but increasingly have acquired the potential to express DEGREE, either in addition or exclusively.

The investigation is based on a limited number of adjectives and their corresponding adverbs. Mild/mildly, warm/warmly and sad/sadly are analysed in detail, the findings are presented in "usage profiles". The polysemy of the lexical items in question is the methodological starting point of the analysis. The various meanings of each are derived from the collocations as they were found in the 31 million-word subcorpora ukmags, ukbooks, Times, BBC, ukephem, ukspoken of the COBUILDDirect corpus. The collocations were ordered in (mainly onomasiologically defined) collocational SETs.

The question is raised if and to what extent the meaning concept of DEGREE can be registered for the various SETs and how it overlaps with MANNER or other meaning concepts. It was found that the process of diversification of meaning goes hand in hand with that of delexicalization. This process is, however, not a straightforward one and does not simply lead from the richness of the adjectival and adverbial meanings to merely marking a certain point on a scale of intensity, ie a grammatical item. Rather, the process is very complex and involves blending of meaning, metaphorization, and the extension of use into semantically almost unlimited collocational SETs.

Appendix: Meaning paraphrases

MILD

1. describing the quality of softness or soothingness of products or substances (eg food, medicine, cosmetics ...)
   

2. describing a specific quality of weather/climate
   

3. describing a specific quality of manners or personality features (e.g. kindliness, gentleness)
   

4. describing a specific quality of sensations (colours, sounds, flavours ...)
   

5. indicating a specific degree of seriousness (that of moderation, average quality) of a disease/a symptom of a disease or disease-like state
   

6. indicating the intensity of feelings, mental or cognitive states (ie as temperate, not excessive)
   

7. generally indicating the degree of a quality or the intensity of an attitude or a phenomenon (others than 1-6)
   

MILDLY

1. expressing the meaning of manner with reference to properties of products or substances (e.g. food, medicine, cosmetics ...)
   

2. expressing the meaning of manner with reference to the quality of weather/climate
   

3. expressing the meaning of manner with reference to the quality of social behaviour or personality features
   

4. expressing the meaning of manner with reference to the quality of sensations (eg colours, sounds, flavours ...)
   

5. indicating the degree of seriousness of symptoms of a disease or disease-like state
   

6. indicating the intensity of emotional, mental or cognitive states or actions
   

7. indicating the degree of a quality or the intensity of an action (others than 1-6)
   

8. describing the manner in which processes/actions happen
   

9. special use: putting it mildly
   

SAD

emotional state of mind: feeling unhappy

1. quality of an event causing the feeling of sadness
   

2. sadness mixed with the idea of inappropriateness of or (the more rational judgement of) dissatisfaction with a situation
   

3. sadness mixed with related concepts such as loneliness or boredom [
4. in ukspoken only: connected with the prosodic feature of laughter, which can be seen as an indication that the frequent use of the word has weakened its emotional load and made it a cliché.]
   

SADLY

1. the manner in which an action is performed
   

2. disjunct evaluating the content of an utterance ("sentence adverbial")
   

3. intensifying the content of adjective/verb X:
   X to such a degree that it makes you feel sad
   

WARM

1. be/feel/keep warm (moderate degree of temperature)
   

2. of behaviour: friendly, making you feel comfortable
   

3. of colours, light or sounds: pleasant
   

4. lively, passionate
   

5. clear, unmistakable
   

WARMLY

1. in a warm manner so that you do not feel cold
   

2. in a friendly, cordial manner; with affection
   

3. with reference to colours, light etc: in a pleasant manner
   

4. intensively, eagerly
   

References

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BÄCKLUND, U. (1973): The Collocations of Adverbs of Degree in English, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Upsala.

BAUER, L. (1994): Watching English Change. London: Longman.

BOLINGER, D. (1972): Degree Words. The Hague and Paris: Mouton.

BORST, E. (1902): Die Gradadverbien im Englischen. Heidelberg: Carl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung.

COLLINS COBUILD English Grammar (1990). London and New York: Collins.

GREENBAUM, S. (1982): "Some Verb-intensifier Collocations in American and British English". In: Harold B. Allen, Michael D. Linn (eds): Readings in Applied English Linguistics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 329-37.

KIRCHNER, G. (1955): Gradadverbien im heutigen Englisch. Halle (Saale): Max Niemeyer Verlag.

PETERS, H. (1993): Die englischen Gradadverbien der Kategorie 'booster'. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

OXFORD English Dictionary (1992). Second Edition (electronic version). London etc.: Oxford University Press.

QUIRK, R. et al. (1989): A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London and New York: Longman.

SPITZBARDT, H. (1954): Die modernen Gradadverbien. Phil. Diss. Jena.

STOFFEL, C. (1901): Intensives and Down-toners. A Study on English Adverbs. Heidelberg: Carl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung.