Publication at Faculty of Education, Faculty of Arts |
2022
Abstract
The paper explores the various functions of the adverbs absolutely and totally in present-day informal spoken British English. It shows that the adverbs, which were originally semantically close, differ markedly across the three dimensions that the analysis focuses on - sociolinguistic (gender and age distribution), syntactic, and semantic/pragmatic.
While the adverbs function most frequently as degree modifiers, they both appear to be following the same trajectory of change from an intensifier, via a stance adverbial to a discourse (response) marker; however, they are currently at different stages of the process of grammaticalization.