A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF MINIMIZERS IN BRITISH  SPOKEN DISCOURSE

MOHAMAD SALIH  A. SULAIMAN; DEJEEN MUHAMMED ALI  TAHA

doi:10.26682/hjuod.2020.23.1.2

MOHAMAD SALIH A. SULAIMAN Dept. of English, College of Language, University of Duhok
DEJEEN MUHAMMED ALI TAHA Dept. of English, College of Language, University of Duhok

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26682/hjuod.2020.23.1.2

Keywords: Intensifiers, downtoners, minimizers, corpus-studies.

Abstract

Intensifiers are among the most widely used adverbs in spoken discourse, and the study of intensifiers
or degree adverbs has been a popular topic in English linguistics (Bolinger (1972), Backlund (1973), Leech
and Svartvik (1975), Quirk et al. (1985), Allerton (1987), Lorenz (2002), Biber et al. (2002), and
Huddleston & Pullum (2002)). However, a close look at the literature on intensifiers reveals that the vast
majority of the previous research focuses on one specific type, i.e. ‘amplifiers’ (cf. Peters 1992; Lorenz
2002; Méndez-Naya 2003, among others), while other subcategories of intensifiers distinguished in the
standard grammar of English have received little attention. To the best of my knowledge downtoners have
been assessed only to a very limited extent in British and American English conversation. Thus, this
research paper is an attempt to address this gap in the literature, by focusing on one of the neglected sub-
categories, viz. minimizers. Specifically, the research aims at providing a comprehensive account of the
syntactic and semantic features of minimizers and their functional distribution in British English
conversation. The study follows the methodology of corpus linguistics. The data are collected from the
spoken texts of The International Corpus of English, the British component (henceforth ICE-GB) which
contains a million words from 200 written and 300 spoken English texts, and is broadly representative of
British English. The International Corpus of English Utility Program (ICECUP III) is used to build
subcorpora according to the syntactic variables of our choice in this study, viz, the frequency of
downtoners, their functional distribution and their collocational patterns. The ICECUP III is used
throughout the research for obtaining and analyzing the data through a qualitative- quantitative mixed-
methods approach. The results of the analysis reveal that in terms of frequency, the occurrence rate of
minimizers in British conversation is markedly low, ie, they are used quite less frequently than other
downtoners. Also, among all other minimizers, at all has the highest frequency of use in British
conversation. The results of the analysis of the functional distribution of minimizers demonstrate that at
all is most often used as sentence adverbial, while the others are used mainly as modifiers.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Allerton, D. J. (1987). English intensifiers and their
idiosyncrasies. Steele and T. Threadgold,
Language topics. Essays in honour of Michael
Halliday,” Amsterdam, John Benjamins, p.
15‒31.
Athanasiadou, A. (2007). On the subjectivity of
intensifiers. Language Sciences, 29(4), 554-
565. Retrieved from:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/
abs/pii/S0388000107000198
Bäcklund, U. (1973). The Collocation of Adverbs of
Degree in English. In Studia Anglistica
Upsaliensia, 13. Uppsala, Sweden: Acta
Universitatis Upsaliensis
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., &
Finegan, E. (1999). Grammar of spoken and
written English. Harlow, England: Longman.
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Leech, G. (2002). Longman
student grammar of spoken and written
English. Personal Education Limited:
Longman.
Bolinger, D. (1972). Degree Words. Hague: Mouton.
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The
Cambridge grammar of the English language.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, G. (2003). Amplifier collocations in the
British National Corpus: Implications for
English language teaching. Tesol Quarterly,
37(3), 467-487. Retieved from:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3588400.pdf
Klein, H. (1998). Adverbs of degree in Dutch and
related languages (Linguistik aktuell, vol. 21).
Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub.
Leech, G. N. & Svartvik, J. (1975). A Communicative
Grammar of English. London: Longman.
Lorenz, G. (1999). Adjective Intensification –
Learners versus Native Speakers: A Corpus
Study of Argumentative Writing. Amsterdam,
Netherlands: Rodopi.
Lorenz, G. (2002). ‘Really Worthwhile or not Really
Significant? A Corpus-based Approach to the
Delexicalization and Grammaticalization of
Intensifiers in Modern English.’ In Wischer, I.
& Diewald, G. New Reflections on
Grammaticalization. Philadelphia
&Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 143-161.
Méndez-Naya, B. (2003). On Intensifiers and
Grammaticalization: the Case of swīþe. In
English Studies, 4, 372-392.
Nevalainen, T., & Rissanen, M. (2002). Fairly pretty
or pretty fair? on the development and
grammaticalization of english
downtoners. Language Sciences, 24(3), 359-
380. Retrieved from:
Otrubčiaková, I. (2011). Downtoners from a Semantic
Point of View (Doctoral Diploma Thesis).
Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia.
Peters, H. (1992). English boosters: Some synchronic
and diachronic aspects. Diachrony within
synchrony: Language history and cognition,
529-45.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., & Leech, G. and Svartvik,
J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the
English Language. London and New York:
Longman.