Strengthening Strategy Across Languages: A Cognitive and Grammatical Universal Phenomenon

Authors: Behnam Jay

Abstract:

In this study, the phenomenon called “Strengthening” in human language refers to the strategic use of multiple linguistic elements to intensify specific grammatical or semantic functions. This study explores cross-linguistic evidence demonstrating how Strengthening appears in various grammatical structures. To enhance the understanding and explanation of this phenomenon, various examples from languages such as English, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish are provided. These examples illustrate how Strengthening operates in different grammatical structures, demonstrating its role in intensifying negation, politeness, and conditional meanings. Beyond these cases, Strengthening can also be observed in interrogative structures, where the combination of question words with rising intonation in various languages serves to enhance interrogative force. These instances suggest that Strengthening functions as a cross-linguistic strategy that may reflect a broader cognitive mechanism in language processing. This paper investigates these cases in detail, providing insights into why languages may adopt such strategies. The examples presented were not collected from a corpus but were instead drawn from languages the author encountered during their research, focusing on specific grammatical and morphological phenomena relevant to the concept of Strengthening. Due to the complexity of employing a comparative method across multiple languages, this approach was chosen to illustrate common patterns of Strengthening based on available data. It is acknowledged that different languages may have different Strengthening strategies in various linguistic domains. Future research should explore this phenomenon more thoroughly by including a wider range of languages and applying more rigorous comparative methods.

Keywords: Strengthening, cross-linguistic analysis, syntax, semantics, cognitive mechanism.

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