What does it mean to intensify a concept?

This forum features Thierry Raeber, speaking on ‘What does it mean to 'intensify' a concept? A linguistic perspective’.

Lexical intensification is a linguistic process through which a speaker intends to communicate a concept to his addressee by making it ‘bigger', or ’stronger'. Saying that John took me 'totally' by surprise is 'stronger' than simply saying he took me by surprise. But ‘bigger' concepts, ‘stronger' ideas are metaphors hiding a complex mental process. What exactly does lie behind them? How do we understand intensified expressions? How do we figure out what the expression really means? We process intensified expressions on a daily basis, without any effort. However, in this presentation I'll try to show that a closer look at these expressions reveal interesting and challenging aspects that require a deep analysis in order to fully understand how they work. In particular, these expressions are sensitive to the context in which they appear. Every occurrence receives a slightly different meaning, so we have to work it out every time. We'll see here some aspects that constitute this online interpretation process. Moreover, even though it is easily done most of the time, it is not safe from occasional failures. These cases give interesting insights to describe the general process of understanding intensified expressions.All are welcome to attend.