He's absolutely massive. It's a super day. Madonna, she is a wicked singer. Youth language and intensification: a corpus-based study

Abstract

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

Intensifiers in MLE: New trends and developments 1

“…Our findings partially confirmed previous studies here, in the sense that adults on the whole use more intensifiers than teenagers (Paradis 2000;Stenström et al 2002;Macaulay 2005;Palacios-Martínez & Núñez-Pertejo 2012). This is clearly observed in all the corpora except for LIC; the fact that the adult sample is formed by speakers over 70 years may account for this.…”

Age-based variation and patterns of recent language change: A case-study of morphological and lexical intensifiers in Spanish

“…Interestingly, our data differ from the attested tendency in some studies on the English intensifying system (Stenström et al, 2002;Palacios & Núñez, 2012), that indicate a more frequent use of intensifiers such as very, completely or totally among adults. Still, we have to take into account that these studies focus exclusively on adjectival intensification.…”

Evolutionary dynamics of hyperbolic language

“…The different degrees of misalignment in our games could be interpreted in many different ways, but it may be more realistic to interpret them as different social situations, perhaps representing different amounts of "immediacy": an individual in a job interview has higher immediacy than a writer of fiction who will never meet their reader, for instance. This would be parsimonious with the empirical results we collected suggesting that the rates of recycling are lowest in written texts and highest in teenage speech (Fig F in S1 File)-while we have limited corpora showing diachronic change in teenage speech, this intuition is further supported by the observation in other studies that the number of intensifiers in the average teenage lexicon is at least twice that of the average adult [67,68].…”