The Use of the Adjective Intensifier well in British English
A Case Study of The Inbetweeners
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8863625 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James M Stratton (0000-0002-7255-5545, Linguistics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue | 8 |
| Pages | 793-816 |
| Publication date | 2018-11-17 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2018.1519150 |
| OpenAlex | W2902252011 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 36 |
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 the last 20 years and provide a more contemporary discussion of its collocational and syntactic distribution in present-day adolescent varieties of British English. The results suggest that this adjective intensifier is used productively, and that the language used in The Inbetweeners is similar to naturally-occurring speech. More broadly speaking, the present study supports the empirical claim that language used in fictional television is a fair representation of what is going on in language
Adjective · Adverbial · British English · Linguistics · Noun · Political science · Representation (politics · Gender Studies in Language · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Psychology · History · Philosophy
Old English intensifiers
Adjective Intensifiers in German
Issues of Faithfulness and Sampling in Historical Corpora
“That’s well good”
A sociolinguistic analysis of intensifiers in Ammani Arabic
‘That's proper cool’
A diachronic analysis of the adjective intensifier well from Early Modern English to Present Day English
Tracing and classifying German intensifiers via information theory
Trends in Teenage Talk
Overhearing Film Dialogue
Degree Words
Television Dialogue
So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Canada
Where Have all the Adjectives Gone
Adolescents and identity
Pure grammaticalization
That is so cool’
The Adverbs of Authority
Intensifiers on Tyneside
Adjectival extremeness
On Intensifiers and Grammaticalization
It ain't Nothing to do with my School.” Variation and Pragmatic Uses of ain ' t in the Language of British English Teenagers
Variationist Sociolinguistics. Change, Observation, Interpretation
Gender, language, and influence
So Weird; So Cool; So Innovative
So who? Like how? Just what
So sick or so cool? The language of youth on the internet
Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool
| Citations per year | 1.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |