The current research project investigates the influence of gender, age, and social class on the use of intensifiers and extreme adjectives as instruments to intensify spoken language. Employing a corpus-based approach, the study has collected data from the Spoken BNC2014 regarding the use of the common intensifiers so, very, real, and really modifying an adjective, as well as the use of synonymous extreme adjectives. Frequent intensifier-adjective pairs were retrieved from the corpus and thereafter translated into synonymous extreme adjectives using an online thesaurus. Following the data collection process, comparative analyses of the collected data were conducted. The study presents results that are in some regards coherent with previous research as well as most of the study’s hypotheses. Although the results suggest some general differences in use depending on the speaker’s gender, age, and social class, they are not as distinct as expected. Of all the sociolinguistic variables, the language use of the different social classes proved least predictable. While correlations between an overuse of intensifiers/extreme adjectives and an underuse of extreme adjectives/intensifiers have been observed in the data, this opposite relationship is not present in all social constellations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-44378 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Inersjö Haegermarck, Jonas |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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