The Use of the Adjective Intensifier well in British English: A Case Study of The Inbetweeners

Abstract

In some present-day varieties of British English the adverbial well can function as an adjective intensifier, as in utterances such as it’s well good and it’s well weird. The present study explores the use of this adjective intensifier in the popular British TV show The Inbetweeners in an attempt to shed light on its contemporary use within the last 20 years and provide a more contemporary discussion of its collocational and syntactic distribution in present-day adolescent varieties of British English. The results suggest that this adjective intensifier is used productively, and that the language used in The Inbetweeners is similar to naturally-occurring speech. More broadly speaking, the present study supports the empirical claim that language used in fictional television is a fair representation of what is going on in language.

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