Intensifiers are grammatical expletives, specifically "expletive attributives" (or, equivalently, "attributive expletives" or "attributive-only expletives", they also qualify as "expressive attributives"), because they function as semantically vacuous filler.
Clinical signs include fluent aphasia, anomia, impaired comprehension of word meaning, and associative visual agnosia (inability to match semantically related pictures or objects).
This suggests the decrease in activation with repetition is process specific occurring when words are semantically reprocessed but not when they are nonsemantically reprocessed.
Instead, she suggests that irony is a... semantically complex process of relating, differentiating, and combining said and unsaid meanings - and doing so with an evaluative edge (p. 89).
