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Corpora and the Changing Society: Studies in the evolution of English
Edited by Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi and Juhani Klemola
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 96] 2020
► pp. 143–168

That’s absolutely fine

An investigation of absolutely in the spoken BNC2014

| University of Gothenburg
This chapter investigates the meanings and functions of the intensifier absolutely, both synchronically and diachronically. The research questions are asked against the background of absolutely becoming more frequent over a short period of time as shown by a comparison of the BNC1994 and the BNC2014. The results show that the developments undergone by absolutely can be described as a trajectory from degree modifier to emphasizer and to discourse marker, as absolutely increases in subjectivity. The description of the semantic and pragmatic developments also requires a sociolinguistic analysis of factors such as age and gender. The analysis shows that young speakers use it less often than older speakers and that it was first used by male speakers and only later by females.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
  • 3.The frequency of absolutely
  • 4.The frequency of absolutely with different syntactic head words
    • 4.1 Absolutely with adjectives
    • 4.2 Absolutely modifying a verb
    • 4.3 Absolutely followed by everything, all, never, nothing, no
    • 4.4 Absolutely with nouns
    • 4.5 Absolutely before preposition phrases
    • 4.6 Absolutely as a discourse marker at the end of the clause
  • 5.The response marker absolutely
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 8 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.96.06aij
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Corpora and software
BNC1994 = The British National Corpus. <[URL]>
BNC2014S = The British National Corpus 2014. <[URL]>
CQP = Corpus Query Processor. <[URL]>
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