Intensifiers in Late Modern English
A Sociopragmatic Approach to Courtroom Discourse
Published on 28. March 2024
Book
Hardback
356 pages
978-1-108-42866-8 (ISBN)
Description
The development of intensifiers has long been identified as an area of vibrant change in Late Modern English. This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive study of intensifiers in this period, and shows how they have changed over time. It uses speech-based and interactive data from the Old Bailey courthouse in London, enriched by extralinguistic information in the Old Bailey Corpus, to investigate an unprecedented range of intensifiers, including downtoners, boosters, and maximizers. The courtroom acts as a social microcosm of the period, providing unique insights on gender, class, and courtroom roles, and their effects on language use. The usage of intensifiers is illuminated from a lexico-grammatical angle, focusing on their formal and semantic features, as well as those of the items they modify. These perspectives are linked to temporal developments from 1720 to 1913, to offer a complete picture of variation and change in the intensifier area.
Reviews / Votes
'This book is a gem. A remarkably rigorous and systematic treatment of intensifiers in Late Modern English (focussing on the Old Bailey Corpus), it travels the whole gamut of pragmatics, from the more formal to the more social, and lights the way for future such studies, whether historical or present-day.' Jonathan Culpeper, Professor of English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University 'This book is an impressively comprehensive study that fills a gap in historical research on intensifiers and imparts clarity over this complex and sometimes bewildering area of study. Intensifier usage is explored both descriptively and through a multivariate analysis, allowing the different social factors to be disentangled. The work will certainly provide the groundwork for future studies of the sociopragmatics of courtroom discourse more broadly.' Laurel J. Brinton, University of British Columbia, VancouverMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
644 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-42866-8 (9781108428668)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Claudia Claridge | Ewa Jonsson | Merja Kyto
Intensifiers in Late Modern English
A Sociopragmatic Approach to Courtroom Discourse
E-Book
03/2024
Cambridge University Press
€105.99
Available for download
Persons
Claudia Claridge is Chair of English Linguistics, University of Augsburg, Germany. She specializes in historical discourse linguistics and (historical) pragmatics. She is the author of Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English (2000) and Hyperbole in English (2011).
Content
1. Introduction: pleading the case; 2. Theoretical and methodological considerations; 3. Intensifiers: forms, features, and functions; 4. Corpus methodology and overview of data; 5. Maximizers; 6. Boosters; 7. Downtoners; 8. Multivariate analysis: intensifiers in a bird's-eye view; 9. Intensifiers across time; 10. The pragmatics of intensifiers; 11. The sociolinguistics of intensifiers; 12. Conclusion: summing up the evidence; Appendices.