English Lanuage

Congratulations on joining the study and exploration of linguistics!

We are setting you off on a mini-language investigation in preparation for your awareness of how language behaves differently between different groups of people – specifically in this case, intensifiers.

An intensifier is a kind of adverb used to give force or emphasis. There are lots of different intensifiers we can use in English, and our preferred varieties depend on who we are.

For example:

1 - ‘that’s a very cool t-shirt’

2 - ‘that’s a really cool t-shirt’

3 - ‘that’s a dead cool t-shirt’

4 - ‘that’s a well cool t-shirt’

…and there are LITERALLY so many more (I am using this ironically!).

These words tend to lose their force as people get used to hearing them, so intensifiers tend to change quite quickly. People tend to use more intensifiers today than they used to, so we might expect to see some variation in the intensifiers used by different people.

Your investigation is in two parts:

A) How do intensifiers change between the younger and older age groups (choose two representative age ranges: eg 16-18 yr olds, and 40 – 50 yr olds)

B) Does gender identity affect the choices of intensifiers?

Ideally you need to obtain evidence (data) from at least 5, ideally 6 people from each group.

You will need to devise a topic of conversation where people are likely to use intensifiers (something emotive!) and you will need to secretly log what you hear!

E.g. What do you think of Boris Johnson’s lifting of Covid restrictions on the 19^th?

Or:

How did you feel about the English loss to Italy in the EU cup? Or the racist comments on social media?

Come to the new course prepared to share your findings!