A part of this lesson deals with intensifiers and downtoners (also called diminishers). These are used a lot in English language. You can check any movie, song or book written in English and you are sure to find a fair share of them.
To get a good idea on which are which and how to use them, here are some examples.
Intensifiers first:
Intensifiers are words which are used to add force to the meaning of verbs, adjectives or other adverbs are called intensifiers.
These are examples of intensifiers:
- I strongly disagree.
- It’s extremely hot in Africa.
- You play soccer very well.
- Do you really mean it?
- He’s pretty inteligent.
- She writes poems too often
- It’s absolutely amazing.
You can say that it is extremely hot in Africa.
This means that it is more than just hot.
And now diminishers.
Degree adverbs which decrease the effect of the modified item are called diminishers or downtoners. As with intensifiers, these adverbs indicate degrees on a scale and are used with gradable adjectives. They include less, slightly, kind of, somewhat, rather, and quite (in the sense of ‘to some extent.’)
Using the same examples:
- I kind of disagree.
- It’s rather hot in Africa.
- You play soccer quite well.
- He’s somewhat intelligent.
- She writes poems quite often.
- It’s kind of amazing.
Saying that it’s rather hot in Africa means
that it is less hot than you might think.
Instead of saying that it is rather hot, you can say
it is warm.
As you can see, there are many ways to modify the degree of an adjective, through the use of intensifiers and diminishers. Using them can help you make your descriptions quite interesting.
Part of this post was taken from
http://www.myenglishpages.com/site_php_files/grammar-lesson-intensifiers.php
http://grammar.about.com/od/d/g/degreemodifierterm.htm
0 Comentarios