Intensive and quotative all: something old, something new

by Rickford et al.

"the intensifier all is not new but has expanded in syntactic environments." quotative all is new and dates from CA in the 80s.

Intensifier all has been used since Old English, but has recently expanded its usage to before full verbs.

Rickford believed that quotative all was on the decline after peaking in the 1990s (I think he's probably wrong here).

In their corpus they found the most frequent intensifiers were: really- 52.3%, so- 18.9%, very- 9.4%, all- 7.4%, totally- 2.7%.

"intensifier all most frequently modifies present participles, PPs, and adjectives..."

Quotative all was the most frequent quotative among CA teenagers in 1990 and 1994, accounting for 45.9%. Quotative like: 17.5%. Unframed quotes: 15.9%. Say: 10.6%

All was much less likely to occur in 2005. Like: 69.3%. Say: 12%. Unframed: 10.7%. all: 4.3.%