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Article published In: Diachronica
Vol. 32:4 (2015) ► pp.449–493

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Stability, stasis and change

The longue durée of intensification

Published online: 10 March 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.32.4.01dar
Intensification is prone to invention and renewal, rendering it ideal for delving into mechanisms of variation and change. Recycling (via lexical replacement) is a putative longitudinal constant, yet grammatical change (via grammaticalization) is regularly invoked in the literature. It is not clear how these complement each other. To probe this issue, this paper operationalizes variationist methods to examine intensification in the Origins of New Zealand English Corpus (ONZE; Gordon et al. 2007). The analysis draws on nearly 13,000 tokens across the longue durée (Braudel 1958, 1980), tracing intensification over 130 years of vernacular speech. The picture that emerges extends beyond the distributional waxing and waning of forms. There is evidence for lexical change, but the longitudinal trajectory is not always continuous. Replacement entails reorganization followed by leveling, and grammatical correlates shift across time. Nonetheless, the inherent form/function asymmetry that characterizes the sector also supports periods of ‘fevered’ change.
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Schweinberger, Martin
2021. On the waning of forms – A corpus-based analysis of decline and loss in adjective amplification. In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218], ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
Schweinberger, Martin
2025. A corpus‐based analysis of adjective amplification in Hong Kong, Indian and Philippine English. World Englishes 44:3 ► pp. 456 ff. DOI logo
Stratton, James M.
2020. A diachronic analysis of the adjective intensifierwellfrom Early Modern English to Present Day English. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 65:2 ► pp. 216 ff. DOI logo
Stratton, James M.
2020. Adjective Intensifiers in German. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 32:2 ► pp. 183 ff. DOI logo
Stratton, James M.
2021. ‘That's proper cool’. English Today 37:4 ► pp. 206 ff. DOI logo
Stratton, James M.
2022. Old English intensifiers. Journal of Historical Linguistics 12:1 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo
Vaughn, Charlotte, Tyler Kendall & Kaylynn Gunter
2018. Probing the Social Meaning of English Adjective Intensifiers as a Class Lab Project. American Speech 93:2 ► pp. 298 ff. DOI logo
Denis, Derek
2017. The Development ofAnd Stuffin Canadian English: A Longitudinal Study of Apparent Grammaticalization. Journal of English Linguistics 45:2 ► pp. 157 ff. DOI logo
Méndez-Naya, Belén
2017. Co-occurrence and iteration of intensifiers in Early English. English Text Construction 10:2 ► pp. 249 ff. DOI logo
Wagner, Susanne
2017. Totally new and pretty awesome : Amplifier–adjective bigrams in GloWbE. Lingua 200 ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
Wagner, Susanne
2019. Whyvery goodin India might bepretty goodin North America. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:4 ► pp. 445 ff. DOI logo
Litty, Samantha, David Natvig, Jessica Funtanilla, Hunter Lockwood, James Maedke, Christopher Tabisz & Joseph Salmons
2016. Anything Goes: Extreme Polysemy in Lexical-Semantic Change. American Speech 91:2 ► pp. 139 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2017. Discourse-pragmatic Variation in Context [Studies in Language Companion Series, 187], DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. On the waning of forms - A corpus-based analysis of decline and loss in adjective amplification. In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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