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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
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