Maria Napoli and Miriam Ravetto have successfully put together an edited volume, focussing on theoretical aspects of the semantics and pragmatics of intensification, and corpus based studies of realizations of intensification ranging from single word forms to larger chunks, intensification and prosody, and the appearance of new expressions and the decline of others. The book takes stock of previous work in this fascinating field of research, provides new insights in a range of languages and poses questions for future research. In addition to the editors’ eminent introductory overview, the volume offers 18 engaging and well-written chapters, grouped together in a clear and lucid way. It is a most stimulating and extremely readable book – a must for anybody interested in intensifiers and intensification.

- Carita Paradis, Lund University,

This volume provides new data, descriptions, and insights in the challenging and intriguing phenomenon of intensification. Recurring themes in the volume are the relation between intensification and other notional categories like comparison, focusing, and evaluation, the distribution of intensifiers across different text types and sociolinguistic parameters, and in particular the objective vs. subjective, emotional-evaluative, dimension of intensification. As Ekkehard König, in his contribution to the volume, puts it : “More often than not, the use of intensifiers tells us more about a speaker than about the situation described”.

- Ad Foolen, Radboud University,

The eighteen high-quality papers in this volume make for a most enlightening and stimulating read. The overall structure of the collection not only presents the reader with a wide variety of approaches to intensification (historical, cross-linguistic, sociolinguistic and corpus-based), but does so through discussions of a wide variety of languages other than English, and thus the volume constitutes a much needed and very valuable contribution to the field.

- Zeltia Blanco-Suárez, University of Santiago de Compostela, in Journal of Historical Pragmatics 23:2 (2022).,