Abstrakt
This paper proposes a comprehensive treatment of Italian adjectival and adverbial phrases introduced by the preposition da, which intensify the meaning of the phrase they refer to through hyperbole: una vacanza da sogno, bella da impazzire, mi annoio da morire. Some of these structures have a highly multifunctional nature: they can modify different parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and be used as discourse markers, independent of syntax.
In the work it will be presented a corpus based classification of the different syntactic patterns and semantic formats associated to this construction. The analysis provides interesting insights for the description of the polysemy of the preposition da and the study of conceptual mapping that encodes the hyperbole.
The last part of the work is devoted to Italian-Russian-English contrastive analysis and represents a first attempt to identify similarities and differences in the use of hyperbolic intensifiers between different languages.