Abstract
Even though intensifiers have received a good deal of attention over the past few decades, downtoners, comprising diminishers and minimizers, have remained by and large a neglected category (but cf. Brinton, this issue). Among downtoners, the adverb little or a little stands out as the most frequent item. It is multifunctional and serves as a diminishing and minimizing intensifier and also in non-degree uses as a quantifier, frequentative, and durative. Therefore, the present paper is devoted to the structural and functional profile of ( a) little in Late Modern English speech-related data. The data source is the socio-pragmatically annotated Old Bailey Corpus (OBC, version 2.0), which allows, among other things, the investigation of the usage of the item among different speaker groups. Our research charts the semantic and formal uses of adverbial little. Downtoner uses outnumber non-degree uses in the data, and diminishing uses are more common than minimizing uses. The formal realization is predominantly a little, with very rare determinerless or modified instances, such as very little. Little modifies a wide range of “targets,” but most frequently adjectives and prepositional phrases, focusing on human states and circumstantial detail. With regard to variation and change, adverbial little declines in use over the 200 years and is used more commonly by speakers from the lower social ranks and by the lay, non-professional participants in the courtroom.
Highlights
Intensifiers have received considerable attention in both synchronic and diachronic research (e.g., Peters 1993; Nevalainen 2008; Tagliamonte 2008; Méndez-Naya & Pahta 2010; Wagner 2017), but most of this attention has focused on amplifiers and to a lesser extent on approximators and compromisers
As the adverb (a) little is multifunctional, serving both as a diminishing and minimizing intensifier as well as in non-degree uses as a quantifier, frequentative, and durative (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik 1985:602), it merits an in-depth look in terms of its linguistic distribution, socio-pragmatic embedding, and its potentially changing fate over time
Before presenting the details for the downtoner and durative uses of little, an overview is in order of the occurrences and development of both as compared to the boosters and maximizers we have investigated in previous studies (Claridge, Jonsson & Kytö 2020, forthcoming)
Summary
Intensifiers have received considerable attention in both synchronic and diachronic research (e.g., Peters 1993; Nevalainen 2008; Tagliamonte 2008; Méndez-Naya & Pahta 2010; Wagner 2017), but most of this attention has focused on amplifiers and to a lesser extent on approximators and compromisers (in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik’s [1985] terminology). As the adverb (a) little is multifunctional, serving both as a diminishing and minimizing intensifier as well as in non-degree uses as a quantifier, frequentative, and durative (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik 1985:602), it merits an in-depth look in terms of its linguistic distribution, socio-pragmatic embedding, and its potentially changing fate over time. While the overall meaning in (5) is a temporal one, the preposition after is gradable (cf Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik 1985:713) and very little functions as a degree-modifying downtoner (minimizer) in (5). Non-degree: duratives, frequentatives, quantifiers diminishers minimizers small extent a little faintly lightly slightly sparingly (very) little barely hardly scantily scarcely a little a bit somewhat All of these uses of little are long-standing in English according to OED (s.v. little) evidence, being attested from Old English or at the latest from Middle English. Inasmuch as (a) little has a hedgy potential, regardless of type, it is clearly useful for speakers in the courtroom, in particular for witnesses who may be uncertain about some aspects or defendants who may want to downgrade responsibility
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