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Course: Grammar > Unit 4
Lesson 4: Comparative, superlative, intensifiers, and adverbs of degreeIntensifiers and adverbs of degree
Words like 'very' and 'slightly' are examples of intensifiers and adverbs of degree. Here's how they work!
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- At1:52, David said a word accentuates. What does that mean?(9 votes)
- In the dictionary it said accentuate means to make prominent or noticeable.(26 votes)
- The Incredibly Deadly viper is actually quite nice. It's name is ironic, and it is actually quite calm, gentle and playful.(21 votes)
- At3:20, you said "the somewhat deadly viper"
Is somewhat a word or should it have a hyphen between it?(8 votes)- "Somewhat" is a perfectly good word. You could look it up at www.dictionary.com(21 votes)
- At3:22He says his import has been slightly blunted, what does that mean?(11 votes)
- To have something's import "slightly blunted" means that that item's importance is not as great as it was before the adverb of degree was introduced to the discourse.(9 votes)
- what does barely mean? I am just a learner(8 votes)
- Barely does not mean almost. It means like when you get to class right before the bell rings, or you made it out of the rain right before it got to a thunderstorm.(7 votes)
- Why do some people use intensifiers in a sentence a lot of times? For example, the sentence "This is a very very very very interesting topic!", the intensifier 'very' is repeated 4 times.(8 votes)
- As a form of emphasis on how very interesting of a topic it was.(7 votes)
- It is the worlds cutest mushroom(7 votes)
- Yes it is the worlds cutest mushroom 🍄(6 votes)
- Very, extremely, and really all end in -y. Is that just a coincidence?
(At2:16, the 2nd book was my favorite!)(6 votes)- As you suspect, this is just a coincidence.(7 votes)
- I got confused about David Alexander and David Rheinstrom being the same person until I saw David Alexander's comment his first and last name, David Rheinstrom, the guy who does the videos here, and finally did some research to see who Rheinstrom is, and if he is a part of khan academy to finally see that its two different people and not the same person commenting and doing the videos. 😂😂(9 votes)
- Are intensifiers and adverbs of degree the same?(5 votes)
- In most cases, they are the same. Try to imagine some intensifiers that are not adverbs of degree. I think you'll find that they're usually the same thing.(5 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Hey,
grammarians, so we've already talked about the idea of the comparative modifiers, right, so you
know the difference between saying something is cute
and then saying that something is cuter than
that thing, and then looking at, like, I don't know,
let's say we're looking at a puppy or a mushroom, a little mushroom with a smiley face and you'd say, "Oh, that's the world's cutest mushroom." Right, that's the comparative,
we've already covered that. I would like to talk
about something I think is a really interesting topic. "What's that," you say? A really interesting topic. Now, what's that really doing there in this little phrase? A really interesting topic. Well, it's modifying interesting. We recognize that this
is an adverb, right? Really is modifying interesting,
which is an adjective. Interesting, in turn, is modifying topic. But, the question is,
what does really mean? What is it's function? And the answer is that it's a type of word we call an intensifier. So the function of really
is to just double down on the idea of interesting. So it's not just an interesting topic, it's a really interesting topic. You could also say it's
a very interesting topic. Or even, an extremely interesting topic. And that kind of gets us
into this other category which is called adverbs of degree. So an intensifier, let me
just step back a little bit, an intensifier is a type of adverb that modifies an adjective or
another adverb in a way that doubles down on the
modified thing's meaning. So it's not just an interesting topic, it's a really interesting topic,
so it's like extra special, extra interesting. It makes, it intensifies,
it really accentuates or makes clear the fact
that you're trying to drive home the
interesting-ness of this topic. But frankly talking about
how interesting a topic is is a pretty good shortcut for boring, so in order to talk
about adverbs of degree I'm going to talk instead about the Incredibly Deadly Viper, which is a creature from A Series of Unfortunate
Events by Lemony Snicket, so the Incredibly Deadly Viper. There it is, there's your
terrifying, horned viper, yonder. And what the word incredibly is doing here is, it is serving as
an intensifier, right. But it is also what we like
to call an adverb of degree because it's saying the extent to which this viper is so very deadly. However, if this viper had a cousin that was the somewhat deadly viper, maybe we can blunt its teeth somewhat, maybe it's got square teeth. That's the somewhat deadly viper. We can see that somewhat, this word here is changing the meaning of the phrase. It's not just the deadly viper, it's the somewhat deadly viper. It's import has been blunted
slightly as have its teeth. And you could also say, what if he didn't have any teeth at all, this
ostensibly deadly viper? What if he just had little gums? Well then he's the barely deadly viper, instead. And these words like
incredibly and somewhat and barely, these are adverbs of degree, so they illustrate the degree to which the viper is deadly dangerous. So that's basically what intensifiers and adverbs of degree do. So, whenever you think of an intensifier just think of the word very, and when you're trying to figure out what an adverb of degree is, well that kind of answers the question, how much? So if you want to double down on the meaning of something
you use an intensifier like very or extremely, and if you want to express a degree of something you could say, let's say we're
talking about a cup of tea or something and you want
to express how warm it is. You could say it's too hot. You could say it's slightly hot. You could say somewhat, or almost hot. There are a lot of
different adverbs of degree. But that's basically the distinction. An intensifier is powerful but it has a very narrow usage. And adverbs of degree, you can use for a wide range of uses to express a variety of different meanings. That's intensifiers and adverbs of degree. You can learn anything. David out.