Means of intensification in the linguistic expression of emotions on the example of contemporary dramatic texts

The article deals with the analysis of linguistic structures which are used in the language of contemporary drama to intensify the expression of emotion. A corpus of four postmodern dramas was compiled for this purpose: 'Tätowierung' by Dea Loher (1992), 'Herr Kolpert' by David Gieselmann (2000), 'Schwimmen wie Hunde' by Reto Finger (2004), and 'Ein Teil der Gans' by Martin Heckmanns (2007). The article is based on the hypothesis that the emotional level of a text can be expressed via linguistic means displaying strong intensity. A theoretical justification of this hypothesis is followed by the analysis of the corpus texts