Browsing by Author "Honkamaa, Krista"

Intensifiers, or degree adverbs, are a common feature of language, yet sometimes difficult to discern. This thesis focuses on four intensifiers, rather, quite, fairly, and pretty, which share a similar kind of meaning, and do not have any clear positive or negative connotation on their own (in contrast to intensifier terribly, for example). These four intensifiers are studied in South Asian English (SAE) and British English (BrE) blog texts using corpus linguistic analysis. As material, this thesis uses the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) which includes material from twenty different English-speaking countries from years 2012-2013 compiled by Mark Davies. Rather, quite, fairly, and pretty are studied by first looking at their frequencies in SAE and BrE blog texts. Secondly, their semantic prosodies (positive, neutral, or negative connotations) are studied by identifying the ten most common adjectives occurring with each intensifier, and classifying these adjectives into positive, negative, and neutral. Understanding the context in which these four intensifiers are used would be useful information for especially English learners because the use of intensifiers can be a complex and easily confusing subject. In this study, the greatest difference between the intensifier usage in SAE and BrE was quantitative. BrE blog writers used quite, rather, fairly, and pretty 1.58 to 2.15 times more frequently than SAE blog writers. In SAE, quite was used the most frequently, followed by rather, pretty, and fairly in descending order. In BrE, the order was rather, quite, pretty, and fairly. The semantic prosodies and adjectives occurring with each intensifier were even unexpectedly uniform between the two English variants. Quite and rather had a neutral, or neutral and positive semantic prosody, pretty a positive, and fairly a neutral semantic prosody based on the ten most common intensifier-adjective -pairs.