Cover not available
Article published In:
Compiling and analysing the Spoken British National Corpus 2014
Edited by Tony McEnery, Robbie Love and Vaclav Brezina
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:3] 2017
► pp. 403–428

Totally or slightly different?

A Spoken BNC2014-based investigation of female and male usage of intensifiers

| University of Mannheim
| University of Mannheim

Since the late twentieth century, the usage of intensifiers, such as absolutely, very or slightly, has been investigated in relation to gender. Whereas previous literature has widely agreed that women and men do indeed use intensifiers differently, there has been some disagreement as to which gender uses them more frequently. Taking up this discussion, this study explores authentic data provided in the Spoken BNC2014S by investigating 39 intensifiers. After establishing the ten most frequently used intensifiers by women and men, these are subcategorized and investigated for gender and age effects. The results generally support earlier findings, however, they also illustrate that there is much interindividual variation and variation regarding individual intensifiers and that there are fascinating interactions with other variables such as age.

Keywords: intensifier, amplifier, downtoner, gender and language, sociolinguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background on intensifiers
    • 2.1Studies on intensifiers and gender
    • 2.2The hypotheses
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Procedure and preparation for the analysis
      • 3.1.1Obtaining the raw data
      • 3.1.2Overview of the 39 intensifiers
    • 3.2Analysing the intensifiers
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.3.05hes
References
Bäcklund, U.
(1970) The Collocation of Adverbs of Degree in English. Uppsala: University of Uppsala.Google Scholar
Bailey, G.
(2002) Real and apparent time. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill & N. Schilling-Estes (Eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp. 312–332). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Barnfield, K., & Buchstaller, I.
(2010), Intensifiers on Tyneside: Longitudinal developments and new trends. English World-Wide, 31(2), 252–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borst, E.
(1902) Die Gradadverbien im Englischen. Heidelberg: C. Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E.
(1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Leech, G.
(2002) Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Bing, J., & Bergvall, V.
(1998) The question of questions: Beyond binary thinking. In J. Coates (Ed.), Language and Gender: A Reader (pp. 495–510). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bolinger, D.
(1972) Degree Words. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bradac, J., Mulac, A., & Thompson, S.
(1995) Men’s and women’s use of intensifiers and hedges in problem-solving interaction: Molar and molecular analyses. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 28(2), 93–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron, D.
(2009) The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Coates, J.
(1996) Women Talk: Conversation between Women Friends. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
(2004) Women, Men, and Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Drescher, N.
(2003 July). The relationships among gender, power, and register in the American academic community. Paper presented at the international conference of Perception and Realization in Language and Gender Research, East Lansing, MI.
Fahy, P. J.
(2002) Use of linguistic qualifiers and intensifiers in a computer conference. The American Journal of Distance Education, 16(1), 5–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hardie, A.
(2012) CQPweb – Combining power, flexibility and usability in a corpus analysis tool. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 17(3), 380–409. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, J.
(1995) Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Ito, R., & Tagliamonte, S.
(2003)  Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society, 32(2), 257–279. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, O.
(1922) Language: Its Nature, Development and Origins. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Kortmann, B.
(2005) English Linguistics: Essentials. Berlin: Cornelsen.Google Scholar
Labov, W.
(1966) The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
(1972a) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. T.
(1975) Language and Woman’s Place. New York, NY: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T.
(this issue) The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319–344 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y.
(2006) Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Macaulay, R.
(2002) Extremely interesting. Very interesting, or only quite interesting? Adverbs and social class. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6(3), 398–417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murphy, B.
(2010) Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Méndez-Naya, B.
(2008) Special issue on English intensifiers. English Language and Linguistics, 12(2), 213–219. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, T.
(2008) Social variation in intensifiers use: Constraint on -ly adverbialization in the past? English Language and Linguistics, 12(2), 289–315. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oakley, A.
(1972) Sex, Gender and Society. London: Temple Smith.Google Scholar
Perkuhn, R., Keibel, H., & Kupietz, M.
(2012) Korpuslinguistik. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink.Google Scholar
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J.
(1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rayson, P.
(2014) CLAWS part-of-speech tagger. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed September 2016).
Romaine, S.
(1994) Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stenström, A.
(1999) He was really gormless – She’s bloody crap. Girls, boys and intensifiers. In H. Hasselgård & S. Oksefjell (Eds.), Out of Corpora. Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson (pp. 69–78). Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Stoffel, C.
(1901) Intensives and Down-toners: A Study in English Adverbs. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S., & Roberts, C.
(2005) So weird; so cool; so innovative: The use of intensifiers in the television series Friends. American Speech, 80(3), 280–300. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Talbot, M.
(2010) Language and Gender (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P.
(1972) Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich. Language in Society, (1)21, 179–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vasilieva, I.
(2004 September). Gender-specific use of boosting and hedging adverbs in English computer-related texts – A corpus-based study. Paper presented at the International Conference on Language, Politeness and Gender, Helsinki, Finland.
Weatherall, A.
(2002) Gender, Language and Discourse. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Xiao, R., & Tao, H.
(2007) A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English. Sociolinguistic Studies, 1(2), 241–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 7 other publications

Aijmer, Karin
2020. That’s absolutely fine. In Corpora and the Changing Society [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 96], ► pp. 143 ff. DOI logo
Aijmer, Karin
2021. “That’s well good”: A Re-emergent Intensifier in Current British English. Journal of English Linguistics 49:1 ► pp. 18 ff. DOI logo
CLARIDGE, CLAUDIA, EWA JONSSON & MERJA KYTÖ
2020. Entirely innocent: a historical sociopragmatic analysis of maximizers in the Old Bailey Corpus. English Language and Linguistics 24:4 ► pp. 855 ff. DOI logo
Claridge, Claudia, Ewa Jonsson & Merja Kytö
2021. A Little Something Goes a Long Way: Little in the Old Bailey Corpus. Journal of English Linguistics 49:1 ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Chen-Yu
2019. Gender and Discipline: Intensifier Variation in Academic Lectures. Corpus Pragmatics 3:3 ► pp. 211 ff. DOI logo
Shi, Yaqian & Lei Lei
2021. Lexical use and social class: A study on lexical richness, word length, and word class in spoken English. Lingua 262 ► pp. 103155 ff. DOI logo
Xu, Feng
2021. Corpora and the Changing Society: Studies in the Evolution of English. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 39:4 ► pp. 425 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.