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.

Chapter 6 focuses on the role of mas (< Sp. más) in Q’eqchi’-Maya and the function of the modern comparative construction (long thought to be a calque of its Spanish equivalent). In contrast to previous analyses, it shows that Q’eqchi’ mas does not function as a comparative (like Spanish más), but rather as a degree modifier, indefinite quantity, and differential operator (like Spanish muy and mucho). It shows that the comparative construction does not require mas but only the positive form of gradable predicate, along with the adposition chiru (before, in the face of) to mark the standard. It shows that mas came into Q’eqchi’ during the late 1800s and seems to have functioned this way from the beginning. In addition, it offers reasons for this shift in meaning and its frequent misanalysis by linguists.

Chapter 7 is about the colonial comparative construction in Q’eqchi’-Maya. It analyzes the form and function of various tokens of this construction, as found in a colonial grammar. It compares this colonial construction with the modern comparative construction, showing how they differ and elucidating the historical relation that connects them. It shows that both constructions were present in the colonial period, overlapped for some time in their comparative function, and are still in use today. At some point around the middle-to-end of the nineteenth century, the colonial construction gave up its comparative function (retaining its original spatial usage, along with a secondary metaphorical usage), and the modern construction took on its comparative function (while retaining its original spatial usage). It argues that the colonial construction did not evolve into the modern construction. Rather, both constructions are part of a larger comparative complex, involving many variants, that has long been active.

Chapter 5 analyzes the structure, function, and history of intensifiers and indefinite quantities in Q’eqchi’. Such forms indicate the relative magnitude (amount, size, or degree) of various dimensions without the use of explicit numbers (two, 300, one million), units (dollars, pounds, degrees), or quantifiers (all, none, some). It surveys the form, meaning, and function of the most frequently used intensifiers in Q’eqchi’. In addition, it sketches a context-sensitive semantics of indefinite quantities, showing their core components and the ways these are mediated by code, context, and culture. It analyzes the comparative grounds presupposed by indefinite quantities and the relative elasticity of the magnitudes they indicate. It uses discourse data to rank the relative intensities, or comparative magnitudes, encoded by indefinite quantities – showing the ways they remain relatively invariant under variation.

How do the semantic and pragmatic properties of a linguistic expression inform its social meaning(s)? We show that the intensifiers totally in American English and -issimo in Italian are perceived as more salient carriers of social meaning in context that require substantial pragmatic work to be interpreted; that is, when they occur in the absence of a gradable predicate (e.g., “totally click on a link”), as opposed to when they target a lexically supplied scale (e.g. “totally full””). We suggest that two factors make these semantic variants particularly apt to serve as social indexes. First, in both cases the semantics of the intensifiers fosters a heightened degree of epistemic and evaluative convergence between the speaker and the hearer, making these expressions particularly apt to perform identity work at the interactional level. Second, both uses of totally and -issimo are linguistically marked with respect to their lexical counterparts. As such, they emerge as suitable linguistic resources to be used for stylistic purposes, in a similar fashion to what has been observed for marked variants in the domain of phonological, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic variation (Bender 2000; Campbell-Kibler 2007, Podesva 2011; Acton and Potts 2014).

Research on gender differences in language use previously focused mainly on affluent, especially Western societies. The present chapter extends this research to acrolectal Indian English, a postcolonial variety of English, investigating how the use of intensifiers (e.g. very, really) is affected not only by the speakers’ gender, but also their age, the gender of the other speakers in the conversation and the formality of the context. Results show some parallels with Western varieties of English, in particular a tendency for women to use more intensifiers than men in informal contexts. However, Indian women modify their usage of intensifiers with respect to the formality of the context more than British women and men, while Indian men do so less than British women and men. In mixed-sex conversations, Indian women also converge with Indian men in their intensifier usage, while neither British women nor men do so. The more flexible use of intensifiers by Indian women may be a response to societal expectations regarding their linguistic behaviour, in order to avoid censure by society. British women likewise continue to be affected by such constraints, but much less so, while the linguistic behaviour of Indian and British men is subject to less criticism.