Intensification strategies in German and Italian written language. The case of prefissi intensivi or Fremdpräfixe

The aim of this study is to investigate a group of six Fremdpräfixe or prefissi intensivi within the context of intensification and to observe both how they work and are perceived by native Italian and German speakers. This work is structured in two parts: the first part is made up of a structured questionnaire to investigate how such prefixes are considered and evaluated from speakers of both languages with the aim of creating an intensity scale. The second part investigates the combinability of the foreign prefixes with specific stems and their presence in a corpus of written language: COSMASII Korpus (IDS Mannheim) for German and CORIS/CODIS Corpus (University of Bologna) for Italian.