This study takes a quantitative corpus-based approach to investigate ongoing change in the Australian English amplifier system. For that end, the study examines co-occurrence patterns of amplifiers and adjectives (cf. 1) based on the Australian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). From a language variation and change perspective intensifiers are particularly interesting because intensifier systems are a major area of grammatical change and particularly prone to change (Ito & Tagliamonte 2003:257; Quirk et al. 1985:590).

(1) a. It was so interesting (ICE-Aus:S1A-004:1$A )

b. He's very bright (ICE-Aus:S1A-048:1$B)

c. It’s pretty bizarre (ICE-Aus:S1A-061:1$B)

d. It was really good (ICE-Aus:S1A-070:1$B)

To arrive at a suitable data set, the corpus data was POS-tagged by implementing a maximum entropy part-of-speech tagger to enable the extraction of adjectives. For each adjective, it was determined whether or not is was amplified and which type of amplifier occurred before a given adjective. To zero in on the variable context, only adjectives that were amplified by a minimum of two distinct amplifier types were considered. Comparative and superlative forms as well as negated adjectives were removed from the analysis.

Aside from investigating the apparent time distribution of amplifiers types, mixed-effects binomial regression models as well as Boruta analyses were applied to evaluate social, psycholinguistic, and intra-linguistic factors the affect amplifier use. The analysis aims to add to our understanding of how an innovative amplifier manages to outcompete rival variants. The underlying hypothesis proposed in this paper is that successful amplifiers attach predominantly to high-frequency adjectives which leads to an increase in the token frequency of that amplifier variant. This increased token frequency causes the amplifier type to become more deeply entrenched which provides the amplifier with an advantage over rival variants as more deeply entrenched forms are easier to retrieve.

The results of the statistical analyses confirm that successful amplifier variants do indeed significantly colllocate with high frequency adjectives – thus substantiating the proposed cognitive mechanisms which uses entrenchment to explain the trajectories of the observable ongoing changes.

References

Ito, R. and Tagliamonte, S. 2003. Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 32: 257-279.

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., and Svartvik, J. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London & New York: Longman.