James Stratton

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State ·  Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures

In some present-day varieties of British English the adverbial 'well' can function as an adjective intensifier, as in utterances such as 'it’s well good' and 'it’s well weird'. The present study explores the use of this adjective intensifier in the popular British TV show 'The Inbetweeners' in an attempt to shed light on its contemporary use within...

While the study of English intensifiers has been a topic of much empirical discussion, intensification in the German language is underexplored. The present study operationalizes variationist methods to comprehensively examine the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German by investigating how adjective intensifiers rank empirically in terms...

Following the Labovian paradigm, the present study uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the linguistic and social factors influencing adjective choices in German. By focusing on adjectives of positive evaluation (such as cool ‘cool’, toll/geil/krass ‘great’), an analysis of over 3,000 tokens reveals that the choice of using one adjecti...

While the use of well as an intensifier of most adjectives had supposedly died out by Early Modern English (Fettig: 1934: 186; Mustanoja 1960: 327; Stenström 2000: 188; Ito & Tagliamonte 2003: 278), no studies have empirically examined its frequency diachronically. The present study traces its use from Early Modern English (1560) to Present Day Eng...

The second-wave feminist movement and the publication of the "Richtlinien zur Vermeidung sexistischen Sprachgebrauchs" catalyzed the rise of many gender-fair innovations in Modern Standard German (Guentherodt et al. 1980). While multiple studies have shown that gender-fair innovations such as the "Paarform" 'pair form' are used frequently in writte...

This study examines variation and change in adjective intensifiers in two Swabian German speech communities: a mid‑sized, semi‑rural environment (Schwäbisch Gmünd) and a large urban metropolis (Stuttgart). Using sociolinguistic interview data from speakers recorded twice across a 35‑year lifespan, the study shows how social factors influence inten...

Over the last five decades, several gender-fair innovations have entered the German language as a result of feminist advocacy work. Consequently, gendered language now pervades written and formal spoken German. However, the extent to which such ideological prescriptivism has affected vernacular speech is an empirical question only recently investig...

In a recent study, English‐speaking L2 learners of German who received explicit instruction made significantly greater improvements in pronunciation and vocabulary than learners who received implicit instruction. Against the backdrop of this work, the present study reports learner preferences and perceptions about implicit and explicit language ins...

The present study uses an acoustic analysis to examine the effects of implicit and explicit pronunciation instruction on the acquisition of German final devoicing in the L2 classroom. Twenty-nine English-speaking L2 learners of German at a North American university were assigned to an implicit or explicit condition. Learner speech samples were reco...

The present study uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the evolution of the semantic field of third-person male adult noun referents from Old English to Middle English, covering a time depth of approximately six hundred years. Results show a shift from the favored variant wer in Old English to man in Middle English, with the diachronic...

Although English and German are both Germanic languages, due to various historical changes, many of their cognates are no longer easily recognizable. This study examined whether knowledge of language history can be beneficial to learners when learning English–German cognates. Thirty‐five English‐speaking second language (L2) learners of 3rd‐semeste...

The present study uses variationist sociolinguistic methods to examine the intensifier system in Oslo Norwegian. Results indicate that both linguistic and social factors influence intensifier use. Predicative adjectives were intensified more frequently than attributive adjectives, women used intensifiers more frequently than men, and younger speake...

While many studies have employed variationist methods to examine longitudinal changes in the English intensifier system (e.g., Ito & Tagliamonte 2003; Tagliamonte & Roberts 2005; Tagliamonte 2008; D’Arcy 2015), to date, no variationist studies have tackled the intensifier system of Old English. By providing a critical view of this system at an earl...

Intensifying adverbs have received much scholarly attention for their promise to provide insight into the workings of language variation and change (Bolinger, 1972; Ito & Tagliamonte, 2003; Tagliamonte & Roberts, 2005; Tagliamonte, 2008; D'Arcy, 2015). As intensifiers become overused, dormant ones re-surface or innovative ones emerge (Tagliamonte,...

The advent of mass electronically available diachronic corpora has undoubtedly changed the methodological plane of historical linguistics. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the types of diachronic corpora available for English, outline the steps to carrying out a diachronic analysis, and lay out some of the challenges and shortco...

Growing evidence suggests that the language used in fictional television can be a fair representation of contemporary language use and changes within the linguistic system. To explore this relationship further, the present study uses variationist quantitative methods to examine the composite system of intensifiers, as well as adjectives of strangen...