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Part of
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja Kytö
Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 301–316

Chapter 18
Intensification in dialogue vs. narrative in a corpus of present-day English fiction

| University of Oslo
| University of Oslo

This chapter examines adverbial intensification of adjectives in present-day English fiction, with the aim of establishing whether dialogic and narrative passages differ in this regard. Although the corpus is relatively small, the study indicates that the frequency of intensification differs across these two subregisters of fiction. Findings of a more qualitative nature include slight differences in preferred choice of intensifiers in dialogue (very > so > too) vs. narrative (so > too > very). Moreover, dialogue has a preference for evaluative adjectives, while narrative shows more variation. A comparison with authentic speech uncovered few clear patterns except the predominance of some high-frequency adverb-adjective combinations. Nevertheless, the differences between fictional dialogue and narrative demonstrate that linguistic phenomena may vary both within and across registers.

Keywords: intensifiers, adverb-adjective combinations, amplifiers, fictional dialogue vs. narrative, attributive vs. predicative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and aims
  • 2.Previous research
  • 3.Material and method
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Some descriptive and statistical observations of the data
    • 4.2Amplifiers and predicative adjectives in EngFic
    • 4.3Collocations of amplifier + ADJ in EngFic compared to authentic speech
  • 5.Summary of findings and concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 5 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.18ebe
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