Intensifiers in Late Modern English

Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-1-108-42866-8
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 356 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 644 g

Reihe: Studies in English Language

The development of intensifiers has long been identified as an area of vibrant change in Late Modern English. This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive study of intensifiers in this period, and shows how they have changed over time. It uses speech-based and interactive data from the Old Bailey courthouse in London, enriched by extralinguistic information in the Old Bailey Corpus, to investigate an unprecedented range of intensifiers, including downtoners, boosters, and maximizers. The courtroom acts as a social microcosm of the period, providing unique insights on gender, class, and courtroom roles, and their effects on language use. The usage of intensifiers is illuminated from a lexico-grammatical angle, focusing on their formal and semantic features, as well as those of the items they modify. These perspectives are linked to temporal developments from 1720 to 1913, to offer a complete picture of variation and change in the intensifier area.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Claridge, Claudia

Jonsson, Ewa

Kytö, Merja

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction: pleading the case; 2. Theoretical and methodological considerations; 3. Intensifiers: forms, features, and functions; 4. Corpus methodology and overview of data; 5. Maximizers; 6. Boosters; 7. Downtoners; 8. Multivariate analysis: intensifiers in a bird's-eye view; 9. Intensifiers across time; 10. The pragmatics of intensifiers; 11. The sociolinguistics of intensifiers; 12. Conclusion: summing up the evidence; Appendices.

Über Autor(innen)

Jonsson, Ewa
Ewa Jonsson is Senior Lecturer of English Linguistics at Mid Sweden University specializing in corpus linguistics, historical sociopragmatics, and multidimensional register studies. She has authored Conversational Writing (2015) and co-edited Voices Past and Present (2020).

Claridge, Claudia
Claudia Claridge is Chair of English Linguistics, University of Augsburg, Germany. She specializes in historical discourse linguistics and (historical) pragmatics. She is the author of Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English (2000) and Hyperbole in English (2011).

Kytö, Merja
Merja Kytö is Senior Professor of English Language, Uppsala University, Sweden. She co-authored Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England (2011) and co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics (2016).