Chapter published in:
Lost in Change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructionsEdited by Svenja Kranich and Tine Breban
[Studies in Language Companion Series 218] 2021
► pp. 235–260
On the waning of forms – A corpus-based analysis of decline and loss in adjective amplification
Martin Schweinberger | The University of Queensland
This study takes a corpus-based approach to investigating the decline and near-loss of very as an adjective amplifier in spoken New Zealand English (NZE) based on The Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English. The paper analyzes the replacement of very as the dominant adjective amplifier across apparent time to provide insights into what factors correlate with and trigger the loss of formerly dominant variants from a variable context. While a wealth of studies has analyzed what causes innovative variants to become dominant, only relatively little attention has been placed on the process of waning. As a consequence, the expansion of innovative variants, e.g. the processes that underlie the expansion in use of really, is well understood; showing that the trajectory of change accompanying the increase of really follows a highly systematic and layered expansion in use. In contrast, questions as to whether the loss of very as a variant in spoken data is equally systematic remain unclear. The results of binomial mixed-effects regression models show that the decrease of very is remarkably uniform and does not parallel the highly systematic and step-wise trajectory of innovative incoming variants. This lack of an ordered heterogeneity that accompanies the retreat of very raises questions about the systematicity of loss as a linguistic phenomenon more broadly.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous research
- 3.Data and methodology
- 3.1Data sources and processing
- 3.2Classification and coding of variables
- very (dependent variable)
- Adjective (random effect)
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Function
- Gradability
- Emotionality
- SemanticCategory
- Frequency
- Priming
- Statistical procedures
- 4.Results
- 4.1Boruta
- 4.2Mixed-effects binomial logistic regression model
- 5.Discussion
-
Notes -
References -
Corpora -
Software
Published online: 16 June 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.218.08sch
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.218.08sch
References
Adamson, Sylvia & González-Díaz, Victorina
Aijmer, Karin
2018a That’s well bad. Some new intensifiers in spoken British English. In Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British English, Vaclav Brezina, Robbie Love & Karin Aijmer (eds), 60–95. London: Routledge.
Althaus, Scott L. & Kim, Young Mie
Baayen, R. Harald
2008 Analyzing Linguistic Data. A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R. Cambridge: CUP.
Barnfield, Katie & Buchstaller, Isabelle
Bauer, Laurie & Bauer, Winifred
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward
Blythe, Richard A
Breban, Tine & Davidse, Kristin
Calle-Martín, Javier
Chen, Henian, Cohen, Patricia, & Chen, Sophie
D’Arcy, Alexandra F
Dixon, Robert M. W
Fuchs, Robert
Gordon, Elizabeth, Hay, Jennifer & Maclagan, Margaret
Gries, Stefan T
Gries, Stefan T. & Hilpert, Martin
Hilpert, Martin
Ito, Rika & Tagliamonte, Sali
Kursa, Miron B. & Rudnicki, Witold R
Labov, William
Lorenz, Gunter R
2002 Really worthwhile or not really significant: A Corpus-based approach to the delexicalisation and grammaticalisation of adverbial intensifiers in Modern English. In New Reflections on Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds), 143–161. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Macaulay, Ronald
Méndez-Naya, Belén
Méndez-Naya, Belén & Pahta, Päivi
Mohammad, Saif M. & Turney, Peter D
Murphy, Bróna
Mustanoja, Tauno F
Nevalainen, Terttu
Nevalainen, Terttu & Rissanen,Matti
Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma & Palacios Martínez, Ignacio
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio & Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma
Paradis, Carita
Partington, Alan
Peters, Hans
Plutchik, Robert
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sydney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan
Rickford, John, Wasow, Thomas, Zwicky, Arnold & Buchstaller, Isabelle
Rissanen, Matti
Schweinberger, Martin
Stenström, Anna-Brita
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt
Tagliamonte, Sali A
Tagliamonte, Sali
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & D’Arcy, Alexandra
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Denis, Derek
Tagliamonte, Sali & Roberts, Chris
Tao, Hongyin
Tulving, Endel & Schacter, Daniel L
Xiao, Richard & Tao, Hongyn
Corpora
Davies, Mark
2010 The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810–2009. <http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/> (30 November 2019).
Software
Hornik, Kurt
2016 Package “OpenNLP” – Apache OpenNLP Tools Interface. <https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/openNLP/openNLP.pdf> (4 November 2019).
Green, Peter & MacLeod, Catriona J
Jockers, Matthew
2017 syuzhet: Extracts Sentiment and Sentiment-Derived Plot Arcs from Text. Version 1.0.1. < https://github.com/mjockers/syuzhet> (4 November 2019).
R Development Core Team
2019 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. <http://www.R-project.org> (4 November 2019).