What intensifier would be good for "EXCITED"? And why?
I would also need an article or something to strengthen my knowledge of intensifiers, whether (and why) adjectives (or whatever) are gradable or ungradable. Thank you.
adverbs
What intensifier would be good for "EXCITED"? And why?
I would also need an article or something to strengthen my knowledge of intensifiers, whether (and why) adjectives (or whatever) are gradable or ungradable. Thank you.
So why is well, an adverb, preferred over good, an adjective, when used with linking verbs?
It's well as an adjective that is preferred over good as an adjective.
Though that well is also an adverb is a factor in two ways.
The first is that since good is sometimes used as an adverb, and this sense is considered incorrect, some of the cases where good should be corrected to well is one of those cases:
*I didn't play good.
The other is that the adjective sense of well grew out of the adverbial sense.
This adjective sense well is more specifically about health and well being, but it probably does originate in an adverbial sense whereby the Old English "ic eom swiðe wel" which word-to-word translates as "I am very-much well" was likely first understood as an adverb modifying the verb am in the existential sense (a bit like "I exist" so "I am existing very well").
Conversely the opposing adverb evil of ic wæs swiðe yfle meant the opposite ("I was very-much evil" meaning you aren't doing so good at being, because you are sick or otherwise beset with misfortune).
The well of this "I am very-much well" then came to be understood as an adjective, giving us the adjective form of well ("I am well" being hence comparable in structure to "I am tall"). The adverb form of evil meanwhile largely died out except perhaps in the expression "speak evil of him".
The other adverbial meanings of well did not become adjectives in the same way ("He is very well at science" is not generally accepted, though "He is very good at science" or "He is doing very well at science" are).
Now, it's perfectly logical to say "I don't feel good" etc., but since well is more specifically about health, that is the form that people keep using for that context, and "I don't feel good" hence sounds wrong to many people.
Not to everyone, and some would see nothing wrong with "I don't feel good" or think it wrong but use it anyway and "I don't feel so good" seems even more reasonable.
When it comes to comparing "I am well" to "I am good" the value of keeping to well for matters of health is more apparent; "I am good" could refer to moral or other qualities while "I am well" is immediately understood as referring to well-being.
So with "I am well/good" there's definitely a strong value in choosing well. With "oh, I really don't feel too well/good" the value is weaker and opinions will begin to differ; sticklers for rules insisting on well to be consistent with everything else as well as because that's a sort of use the word came to us serving, while others would just consider it understandable, logical, and clear.
The word why can obviously be used as a conjunction, as your examples clearly indicate.
The problem is with the dictionaries.
To see why, consider this Wikipedia article on Natural Language Processing. In the original “rules based” approach to language processing, the analysis of a speech fragment depended on the fragment conforming to an expression that could be generated from a grammar. The association of a given word with a part of speech would therefore determine the expressions that could be generated.
However, the “rules based” approach has been largely superseded by the “statistical” approach, partly because the rules themselves became complex and unwieldy.
But my real point is this: Dictionaries are written by human beings with a fundamentaly limited rules-based approach to language processing. As the human user attempts to apply the dictionary rules (parts of speech, etc.), he or she inevitably runs up against the same problems as the computer programmer trying to implement similar rules in their code. The rules printed in the dictionary are simply not powerful enough to deal with the range of expressions found in real life.
From the statistical point of view, why is found in multiple roles. However, the dictionary writer, aiming at readability instead of completeness, inevitably has to leave some of these out.
It is worth noting that even a simple natural language processing program like Siri (or the Office Online spelling assistant) has already analyzed more sentences than you or I could read in a thousand lifetimes. Their “dictionaries” and “grammar manuals” go far beyond what can be found in Collins or the Oxford.
So in practice, the occurrence of why in the role of a conjunction means that the part-of-speech attribute conjunction can be applied to the word why.
I suppose we could go further and argue about whether the assignment of an attribute means that something actually “is” something, with a digression into deep epistimology, social constructions of meaning, and that kind of thing. However, if we accept that the statistical concept of natural language processing has been validated through its practical application, even for the sake of argument, then we should be willing to accept the assignment of attributes by the programs that have analyzed the largest number of examples, your own examples counting among them.
Best Answer
Of those three my choice goes for tremendously excited. Why? To be honest it is my gut feeling, and the ngram shows it is by far the most popular choice of the three. But now I’m going to engage in a bit of ex-post rationalization.
Utterly and completely are synonyms; utterly is more emphatic. So my feeling is utter and complete work best with things that can be, well, complete: destruction, failure; even nonsense can be complete if there isn’t a grain of sense in it. But it is difficult to think of a limit to excitement, so utter and complete don’t work so well with it.
On the other hand, tremendous is as per Merriam-Webster very large or great; very good or excellent. This goes well with excitement, as it does with popular and funny, which are somehow related to excitement. In fact the above is the simple definition of tremendous. The full definition, sense 1, actually has something of excitement in it:
Having made my case for tremendously over utter and completely, I’d like to suggest that wildly is even stronger than tremendously as an intensifier for excited. Picking up the Pointer Sisters’ line Benjamin Harman brought to our attention:
If you say “I’m wildly excited” you don’t even need to explain you’re about to lose control: wild means out of control already. This ngram shows that wildly excited is a more popular choice of words than tremendously excited.