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Chapter 6 - Boosters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2024

Claudia Claridge
Affiliation:
University of Augsburg
Ewa Jonsson
Affiliation:
Mid Sweden University
Merja Kytö
Affiliation:
Uppsala University
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Summary

The boosters found in the Old Bailey Corpus (1720–1913) are documented in this chapter, with regard to their overall frequency distributions and usage patterns. This includes an overview of the entire inventory of 44 types and 47,613 tokens, which makes it the largest intensifier group in the data. Very is found to dominate the data, followed by far less frequent so and greatly as well as many fairly low-frequency items. Semantically, boosters are subdivided into originally quantitative (denoting amount: greatly, extent: widely) and qualitative types (e.g., denoting truth: very, perception: strikingly or evaluation: badly). Formally, the two most frequent types are unmarked adverbs (very, so); two other boosters prefer the suffixless form to a large extent (great, wide). The targets modified by boosters are mostly adjectives, followed by adverbs, while verbs and prepositional phrases are rare.

Type
Chapter
Information
Intensifiers in Late Modern English
A Sociopragmatic Approach to Courtroom Discourse
, pp. 120 - 162
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Boosters
  • Claudia Claridge, University of Augsburg, Ewa Jonsson, Mid Sweden University, Merja Kytö, Uppsala University
  • Book: Intensifiers in Late Modern English
  • Online publication: 15 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108560627.006
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  • Boosters
  • Claudia Claridge, University of Augsburg, Ewa Jonsson, Mid Sweden University, Merja Kytö, Uppsala University
  • Book: Intensifiers in Late Modern English
  • Online publication: 15 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108560627.006
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Boosters
  • Claudia Claridge, University of Augsburg, Ewa Jonsson, Mid Sweden University, Merja Kytö, Uppsala University
  • Book: Intensifiers in Late Modern English
  • Online publication: 15 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108560627.006
Available formats
×