Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach to the curious and ubiquitous act of linguistic intensification, Flores-Ferrán provides insightful analysis that draws on key concepts from pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and even rhetoric. This is the work of a master interpreter of language whose work has additional implications for research into language acquisition, human-computer interaction, and the role of culture in the expression of emotion.
— Richard Cameron, professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago
Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective, this book offers a comprehensive and insightful treatment of intensification, a pragmatic phenomenon that reflects the speaker’s attitude and commitment to the message in order to amplify, escalate, persuade, insult, insist, or reinforce the speaker’s communicative intention. The analysis includes data from institutional and non-institutional discourse in English and Spanish. This is a must-read book for students and researchers in linguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis whose objective is to understand, research, and teach linguistic intensification.
— J. César Félix-Brasdefer, Indiana University