Great big stories and tiny little changes: tautological size-adjective clusters in Present-day English

Abstract

This case study focuses on intensificatory tautological constructions (e.g. tiny littlebird, big hugepay rise). The attention that intensificatory tautology has elicited in previous literature is scarce and often centred on specific aspects of its Present-day English (PDE) distribution. Formally, tautological intensificatory patterns often involve the combination of two synonymous size-adjectives (e.g. massive great, tiny little) in a given order (i.e. great big but not big great). Functionally, they are standardly associated with emphatic descriptive modifying functions and informal styles (Matthews 2014: 364; Coffey 2013: 59; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 561–2). This contribution takes a corpus-based, synchronic standpoint in order to (a) refine previous literature's account of the formal and functional distribution of tautological size-adjective clusters in PDE and (b) assess the significance of tautological intensification for functional–structural descriptions of the English Noun Phrase. The analyses indicate that PDE intensificatory size-adjective clusters have a wider functional distribution than has hitherto been observed, with reinforcer and adverbial intensifying functions slowly developing alongside the descriptive modifier functions. More generally, the article shows that tautological size-adjective clusters create pockets of interpersonal meanings whose impact on the formal and functional structure of the NP needs further exploration.