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.%
Showing posts with label quotatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotatives. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant messaging and teen language
by tagliamonte and denis in toronto
The authors studied thousands of IMs gathered from teen mentees in Toronto and analyzed quotatives, future modals, and abbreviations stereotyped as being IM language. The authors found that "Contrary to
expectation, speech has a more innovative proļ¬le in comparison to IM. The
incoming forms so, be like, and have to are all more frequent in the speech
data. At the same time, speech tends to be more vernacular, containing
higher rates of going to than will. In contrast, IM language is consistently more
varied, exhibiting a wider range of variants than speech and, in particular,
containing a higher proportion of standard forms than speech."
Haha is more commonly used than lol, despite popular perceptions.
Tagliamonte says that the "language police" are exaggerating the amount of lols and colloquialisms in IM speech and that IM speech has the same linguistic variation and change as written and spoken language.
It is a register where people can fuse formal and colloquial language and therefore is a free space, ripe for language innovation.
The authors studied thousands of IMs gathered from teen mentees in Toronto and analyzed quotatives, future modals, and abbreviations stereotyped as being IM language. The authors found that "Contrary to
expectation, speech has a more innovative proļ¬le in comparison to IM. The
incoming forms so, be like, and have to are all more frequent in the speech
data. At the same time, speech tends to be more vernacular, containing
higher rates of going to than will. In contrast, IM language is consistently more
varied, exhibiting a wider range of variants than speech and, in particular,
containing a higher proportion of standard forms than speech."
Haha is more commonly used than lol, despite popular perceptions.
Tagliamonte says that the "language police" are exaggerating the amount of lols and colloquialisms in IM speech and that IM speech has the same linguistic variation and change as written and spoken language.
It is a register where people can fuse formal and colloquial language and therefore is a free space, ripe for language innovation.
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