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6 - “That Is Totally Not My Type of Film”

Innovations in the Intensifier System of UK English

from Part II - Innovative Variables in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2022

Elizabeth Peterson
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Turo Hiltunen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Joseph Kern
Affiliation:
University of Virginia’s College at Wise
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Summary

The chapter establishes a baseline of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of a “new” totally in UK English in the 2010s, as demonstrated through the BC2014S. It offers a short–term diachronic perspective on the developments of totally, comparing the instances of totally from the BNC2014S with the original British National Corpus. A distinction is made between a lexical (maximizing) category, booster, and emphasizer. In its lexical use, totally can be replaced by completely, the adjective or verb modified by totally is bounded, and the speaker’s perspective is less present. In the emphasizer function, totally co–occurs with an unbounded verb or adjective and can be replaced by certainly. Totally has been regarded as a booster when it combines with gradable adjectives to express a high degree of adjectival property. Totally can stand alone with the function to respond to a previous utterance in the conversation. The semantic development of totally from an intensifier to an emphasizer is an example of subjectification and grammaticalization. As a discourse marker with reactive function, totally becomes integrated into a paradigm of epistemic adverbials. The sociolinguistic findings point to a connection between the semantic or pragmatic properties of totally and young people, especially young females.

Type
Chapter
Information
Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change
Theory, Innovations, Contact
, pp. 127 - 149
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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