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This paper aims to comparatively present the means of expressing intensity in Romanian and Spanish from a predominantly synchronic perspective, without neglecting the importance of the diachronic study of language facts and the etymological clarifications, where needed. We have chosen to discuss only one aspect of the complex act of evaluation, more specifically, the means of rendering highest and lowest intensity, because of the complexity of this phenomenon which constantly expands its linguistic encoding forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any theoretical analysis of a fragment of reality is carried out by means of abstract models and aims to capture the specificity of a phenomenon. Theorising may nevertheless prove insufficient if its descriptive analysis is not doubled by the establishment of regularities, so that the current state of the phenomenon and its subsequent evolution may be explained. This general framework also includes linguistic intensification, which reveals one’s permanent need to evaluate everything that enters one’s sphere of perception: objects, beings, states, processes etc. The means of expressing “intensity” are most diverse and, implicitly, sensitive to any type of nuancing of the speaker, because it uncloses the shape its mental representation socially takes. This paper aims to highlight a certain aspect in the complex act of evaluation, namely expressing highest/lowest intensity by means of suffixes. The study relies on the analysis of two modern related languages, Romanian and Spanish, and the corpus has been essentially selected from the most modern form of human communication, the computer-mediated one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In human communication, the ascertaining acts of speech are most often doubled by certain evaluative acts. Man is tempted, through his nature, to issue certain judgements of value with regards to everything that surrounds him and/or with regards to his own being. These are reflected in the linguistic structures in complete concordance with their degree of logical pithiness: some are more discretely formulated, such as implicit comparisons or intermediary graders, of detail for unquantifiable assessments, others are categorical formulations, placed at the beginning end of certain subjective or objective value axes. In the following, we shall present several logical-linguistic means of expressing highest intensity within two genealogically related languages - Romanian and Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]