It’s well weird: Degree Modifiers of Adjectives Revisited: The Nineties

Abstract

In a recent publication, I investigated a set of degree modifiers and the adjectives they combine with in spoken British English, e.g. absolutely marvellous, very nice, rather small, a bit funny. My main focus was on semantic and intonational features, but I also paid attention to their use in terms of frequency and collocability in authentic speech. The material that I used was the London-Lund Corpus (henceforth LLC). As is well known, LLC is getting old. Most of the texts are from the sixties and seventies, and it would therefore be interesting to compare the results from this study with more recent material. The purpose of the present study is to investigate degree modifiers and their adjectives in contemporary speech. First, I compare the use of degree modifiers of adjectives in LLC with their use in the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (henceforth COLT). The two corpora are of the same size, i.e. half a million words. However, they differ as to time of recording and speakers. The texts in COLT are all from 1993 and most of the speakers are teenagers, while the LLC texts are over twenty years old, and the speakers are adults. I then analyze the conceptual matching of the modifier–adjective combinations across the corpora. The basic assumption is that the differences with respect to time and speakers have implications for the use of degree modifiers, and we may thus be able to identify changes in their use both in terms of frequency and combinatorial patterning. The following degree modifiers are examined:

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