In this theoretical background chapter, intensifiers are defined as degree-indicating devices and distinguished from items indicating similar and partly overlapping concepts such as quantification, emphasis, focus, and modality. They are subclassified into the categories of amplifiers (maximizers, boosters) and downtoners (moderators, diminishers, minimizers), with different semantic characteristics and effects. Formally, they are restricted to one-word adverbs, both with and without the -ly suffix. Their typical collocational associations and syntactic behaviour regarding preferred modified targets is dealt with. Their pragmatic distributions in different situational contexts is briefly touched on

The boosters found in the Old Bailey Corpus (1720–1913) are documented in this chapter, with regard to their overall frequency distributions and usage patterns. This includes an overview of the entire inventory of 44 types and 47,613 tokens, which makes it the largest intensifier group in the data. Very is found to dominate the data, followed by far less frequent so and greatly as well as many fairly low-frequency items. Semantically, boosters are subdivided into originally quantitative (denoting amount: greatly, extent: widely) and qualitative types (e.g., denoting truth: very, perception: strikingly or evaluation: badly). Formally, the two most frequent types are unmarked adverbs (very, so); two other boosters prefer the suffixless form to a large extent (great, wide). The targets modified by boosters are mostly adjectives, followed by adverbs, while verbs and prepositional phrases are rare.

This chapter concludes the book by summarizing the main results and discussing future prospects of study.

Academic writers with different linguistic backgrounds communicate scientific findings following objective norms, although they do so in different ways, as is evidenced in intercultural studies. This chapter focuses on the identification of boosters and hedges used by Spanish and Chinese researchers to persuade readers about scientific findings in engineering and linguistics. The objectives were to categorize and compare the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters used by nonnative writers of English, to study whether there are any linguistic and cultural differences, and to identify boosting and hedging features different from those used in English as a mother tongue. The material was a corpus of 120 academic papers on linguistics and engineering papers written by Spanish and Chinese researchers. Boosters and hedges were spotted and occurrences extracted and classified with METOOL, a tool designed to identify metadiscourse markers. In the results, it was shown that Chinese writers used more boosters and hedges than their Spanish peers. To conclude, it was observed that although Chinese and Spanish writers tend to be assertive in their mother tongue, mitigation was used to adopt an academic style.