intensifiers: which is more powerful

[Michael Newman]

Krugman (my hero) has an interesting use of intensifiers in his blog today.: (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/taxes-and-the-wealthy/)


the CBO estimates that separate the really rich from the only very rich only go up to 2005:

He then goes on to say: "Changes in tax rates have strongly favored the very, very rich."

We usually think of intensifiers as roughly equivalent, but here there's a ranking although I'm not sure which is supposed to be more powerful, "really" or "very." I think it's "very," but I'm not confident about that. 



Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu

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