DISEÑO DE CONTROL

The best is implicitly compared with the worst> which is all the ‘people of the struggle’ had. And best is also compared with better, which is what white people wanted. These comparisons are possible because the worth of things is gradable:

best/better/g ood/ bad/wo rse/worst

Comparison is also found in Tutu’s exposition and the Act:

a far more personal approach as complete a picture as possible

His intensifiers belong to scales such as the following:

slightly more/a little more/a lot more/far more less than/as much as/more than

Some comparison refers to an excess of feeling, as when Helena criticizes the lack of responsibility taken by the leaders of white South Africa and Tutu notes the problem of intimidation for some witnesses:

too holy and innocent

too intimidated to testify in open session

Too contrasts with enough in this region of meaning:

not enough/enough/too much

We won’t go into more detail about resources for intensifying feelings here.

There is a useful discussion of ‘amplifiers’, ‘downtoners’ and ‘emphasizers’ in Quirk et al. (1985), and see also Hyland (1998) on ‘hedging5. And there is a very useful

outline of grading adverbs in Collins Cobuild (1998) which shows in particular that many intensifies themselves involve attitude:

amazingly beautiful unusually beautiful dangerously beautiful breathtakingly beautiful

There are also several other areas of meaning that involve grading for example quantity, m anner and modality:

quantity all/several/some of my questions manner degree shake franticaiiy/uncontroliabiy/excitedly

modality there must/would/might have been someone out there

A complete analysis of amplification would usefully include these kinds of meanings. We’ll discuss modality further below under Sources, but here we’ll restrict ourselves to graded feelings.

Next let’s examine vocabulary items that include degrees of intensity, such as happy/delighted/ecstatic. These kinds of words are known as attitudinal lexis, i.e.

‘lexis with attitude’. The intensifiers we have already looked at, like better/best, all/

several/some, must/would/might, are grammatical items. That is their meaning depends on being combined with 'content words’. By contrast, ‘content words’ are referred to technically as lexical items, or simply lexis.

* Attitudinal lexis plays a very im portant role in Helena’s narrative, as it does in general across story genres. Helena for example says that she and her second love were ecstatic about his promotion, as opposed to say happy, chuffed, delighted or elated. These are all lexical items that refer to degrees of happiness. It’s not always easy to arrange groups of words like these confidently along a scale, but there are obviously various degrees of feeling involved. With these items, amplification is fused into the words themselves, so that in the dictionary chuffed is defined as Very pleased’, with the amplification factored out as very.

Here are some more examples of attitudinal lexis from Helena’s Incidents, with some suggested scales of intensity:

vivacious man torn to pieces ecstatic bewildered

blood-curdling shrieks of fear pleading

dull/placid/lively/vivadous

saddened/grief stricken/torn to pieces happy/ch uf fed/de I ig hted/elated/ecsta ti c bemused/puzzled/confused/bewildered whimper/groan/cry/screech/shriek ask/request/pray/beseech/piead

With lexical resources like these, the line between categories can be h ard to draw a n d it is not always clear just how many items to include as pushing up the volume in analysis. As a rule of thumb, the words recognized will be ‘non-core vocabulary’

(C arter 1987), i.e. lexical items other than those most commonly used in English, a n d they will tend to be defined in dictionaries with intensifiers like very.

B eyond this, we can also be guided by the prosody o f feeling that colours a whole phase of discourse. In Helena’s narrative for example attitudinal lexis is more a feature of her Incidents than her Orientation or Interpretations. And genre is also a factor. Tutu uses less of this resource in his exposition, but there are some examples:

a frivolous question

the fuff glare of television lights humiliation for the perpetrator impunity

On the other hand, the Act arguably uses no attitudinal lexis at all, just as it avoids intensifiers like very. So we can score various genres on how much amplification they are likely to display: narratives tend to amplify most, expositions less so, and administrative genres like the Act amplify very little.

Another feature of certain genres is that grading is erased when we technicalize attitude. For example, in common sense terms gross is at the extreme o f scales such as minor/unacceptable/gross or unpleasant/disturbing/gross. But once we define a gross violation o f human rights then gross doesn’t scale how unacceptable or unpleasant the violation is any more. Gross simply becomes part of the name of the offence, classifying the type of offence, rather than intensifying it:

a gross violation of human rights - defined as an abduction, killing, torture or severe iii-treatment

As well as the lexical items we’ve seen above, attitudinal lexis also includes metaphors and swearing. We’ve already considered Helena’s metaphors in relation to affect, but we can note here that they also have an amplifying effect:

ice cold in a sweltering night dull like the dead

blood-curdling shrieks

These metaphors tell us how cold her second love was, how dull his eyes were, and how frightening his screams were.

As well as metaphors, Helena also uses swearing in her Interpretation to express her frustration with white South African leaders:

Our leaders are too holy and innocent. And faceless. I can understand if Mr (F. W.) de Klerk says he didn't know, but dammit, there must be a clique, there must have been someone out there who is still alive and who can give a face to 'the orders from above' for all the operations. Dammit! What else can this abnormal life be than a cruel human rights violation?

Perhaps what we are looking at here is feeling which becomes so amplified it explodes - a kind of short-circuit which disengages amplification from what is being appraised (the leaders’ character) and ‘cuts loose’ as a swear word. The role of swearing needs further exploration, including its relationship with ‘interjections’

(Quirk et al. 1985), such as ugh, phew, gr-r-r-r, inv, whew, tut-tut etc. Eggins and Slade (1997) and Allen and Burridge (2006) also have some relevant discussion.