By the late twentieth century, a multiethnolect generally known as Multicultural London English (MLE) emerged in this city, reflecting many different countries, races and cultures. This paper is corpus-based and is concerned with the system of intensifiers in MLE, examining data primarily from the London English Corpus (LEC). In the analysis we draw contrasts between teen and adult language; other variables, such as speakers' gender and ethnicity are also considered. Our findings broadly confirm partially previous studies, showing that so and really are the most common intensifiers among London teenagers, in contrast to very, which is the most frequent in adults. Secondly, we identify in teen talk two new intensifiers which have not been described as such in the literature: bare (it's bare addictive) and proper (they were proper strict in school); these have not been recorded in the language of adults. The paper concludes by discussing the possible reasons for the emergence of these two new intensifiers.

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In the last few years, the language of teenagers has been the focus of attention from different perspectives. One of the features that characterizes this type of language is the particular way adolescents intensify their language. This is precisely the object of study of this paper. For this purpose, we have analyzed data from different corpora: COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language), SCoSE (Saarbrücken Corpus of Spoken English), and DCPSE (Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English) together with additional materials from other written and oral sources, including magazines oriented specifically to teenagers, British Library archival sound recordings, Web sites and Web-based glossaries of British teenagers' language. The results obtained show the frequent use of

The Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses is published yearly by the Department of English at the University of Alicante in volumes of approximately 250 pages. The journal aims to provide a forum for debate and an outlet for research involving all aspects of English Studies. NATURE AND FORMAT OF THE ARTICLES:The Revista would welcome ar ticles of the following kinds: (1) Articles on linguistics and ELT, literature, literary theory and criticism, history and other aspects of the culture of the English-speaking nations. Articles should not exceed nine thous and words in length.(2) Bibliogra phies of studies on very specifi c topics, providing a brief in troduction and a list of basic publications. A concise index of contents may optionally be included. (3) Reviews and review ar ticles on recently published books in the fi eld of English Stu dies. (4) Poetry translations (English-Spanish and Spanish-Eng lish). All articles submitted should follow the guidelines which can be obtained from the following Internet address:http://www.ua.es/dfi ng/publicaciones/raei/general/instrucciones.htm Manuscripts should include an abstract in English of about one hundred words in length. In normal circumstances, the editors will only consider for publication those contributions written in English and recorded on disk. Two print-outs of the contribution should also be included. Articles will only be returned at the authors' express wish, if so requested at the time of submission. All correspondence should be addressed to: AbstractThe aim of this paper is to provide a descriptive account of the development of the semantics of English be + -ing from Old English (henceforth OE) to early Modern English (henceforth eModE). Questions such as whether it is possible to ascribe one single meaning to the cluster or whether the modern English (henceforth ModE) function(s) can be traced back to OE will be dealt with in this study. In this respect, examples from OE, Middle English (ME) and eModE will be analyzed and discussed to illustrate the use of the progressive in such periods. Moreover, the combination of be + -ing and time adverbials will also be described in this paper, since the study of the interrelation between IntroductionT he semantics of the progressive has been -and still is-the object of much controversy. Recent and not so recent research has tried to answer a number of questions on this topic, such as whether it is possible to ascribe one single function to be + -ing or whether the cluster expresses more than one unitary meaning. As a general rule, there is little or no agreement on the specifi c functions or meanings conveyed by the progressive in ModE, nor for that matter, in earlier periods of the history of English. However, in Visser's opinion, be + -ing combinations show one function applicable to OE, ME and ModE examples (1963-1973: §1806), which partly coincides with Hirtle & Bégin's idea that every use of the progressive can be explained in terms of one, single, unitary meaning (1990: 9). As we shall see in the fo...