General discussion

It is not a rare phenomenon for the lexical items to express modal necessity and intensification, e.g., Stenström (1986), Paradis (2003), Simon-Vandenbergen (2008), Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007), etc. Stenström (1986) and Paradis (2003) conduct a detailed exploration of really in English. Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007) examine the semantics of a set of adverbs of certainty, such as really, definitely, of course, definitely, and so on.