A Corpus-based Study of Minimizers in British Spoken Discourse

Abstract

Intensifiers are among the most widely used adverbs in spoken discourse, and the study of intensifiersor degree adverbs has been a popular topic in English linguistics (Bolinger (1972), Backlund (1973), Leech and Svartvik (1975), Quirk et al. (1985), Allerton (1987), Lorenz (2002), Biber et al. (2002), and Huddleston & Pullum (2002)). However, a close look at the literature on intensifiers reveals that the vast majority of the previous research focuses on one specific type, i.e. ‘amplifiers’ (cf. Peters 1992; Lorenz 2002; Méndez-Naya 2003, among others), while other subcategories of intensifiers distinguished in the standard grammar of English have received little attention. To the best of my knowledge downtoners have been assessed only to a very limited extent in British and American English conversation. Thus, this research paper is an attempt to address this gap in the literature, by focusing on one of the neglected sub-categories, viz. minimizers. Specifically, the research aims at providing a comprehensive account of the syntactic and semantic features of minimizers and their functional distribution in British English conversation. The study follows the methodology of corpus linguistics. The data are collected from the spoken texts of The International Corpus of English, the British component (henceforth ICE-GB) which contains a million words from 200 written and 300 spoken English texts, and is broadly representative of British English. The International Corpus of English Utility Program (ICECUP III) is used to build subcorpora according to the syntactic variables of our choice in this study, viz, the frequency of downtoners, their functional distribution and their collocational patterns. The ICECUP III is used throughout the research for obtaining and analyzing the data through a qualitative- quantitative mixed-methods approach. The results of the analysis reveal that in terms of frequency, the occurrence rate of minimizers in British conversation is markedly low, ie, they are used quite less frequently than other downtoners. Also, among all other minimizers, at all has the highest frequency of use in British conversation. The results of the analysis of the functional distribution of minimizers demonstrate that at all is most often used as sentence adverbial, while the others are used mainly as modifiers.