“Holding Grudges Is So Last Century”: The Use of GenX So as a Modifier of Noun Phrases

Abstract

This article focuses on the X is so NP-construction in American English, as exemplified by “Holding grudges is so last century” (SOAP, As the World Turns, 2002). Drawing on the Corpus of American Soap Operas (Davies 2011-), the aim of this study is to provide an account of the distributional pattern of noun phrase modification with so, including preferences in modified noun phrase (NP) types and concomitant differences in the meaning of so. The analyses reveal that, in line with subjectification theory on intensification (Athanasiadou 2007), so is expanding its functional range from intensification to emphasis. The findings suggest a near-complementary distribution of these meanings, with intensifying so (‘very’) dominating in affirmative sentences (especially with object pronouns and names; “It’s so Star Trek”; SOAP, Days of Our Lives, 2004), and emphatic so (‘definitely’) in negated utterances (especially with pre-modified NPs, such as “It is so not a date”; SOAP, One Life to Live, 2007). Furthermore, intensifying uses of so are restricted to NPs that exhibit adjective-like characteristics and invite metonymic referencing (Gonzálvez-García 2014). So is attested almost exclusively with the copula be, which might hint at restrictions at work in this construction. With respect to the distribution of GenX so across the character groups, the scriptwriters attributed most utterances to (younger) women, in terms of both token frequency and dispersion within the group. This paper shows that the observations pertaining to language variation and change made for adjective intensification (“ so good”) also apply to NP intensification (“ so 2020”).

“He should so be in jail”: An Empirical Study on Preverbal So in American English

“…Drawing on the Corpus of American Soap Operas (SOAP), the present study has provided empirical evidence for various claims previously made about the use of GenX so. These are in particular: a) it can occur in all types of declarative sentences (Irwin 2014(Irwin , 2015; b) it can appear either before or after auxiliaries and modals (Irwin 2014(Irwin , 2015 but the preference is for post-position (roughly 9:1); c) with the going to-future, it favors second person subjects (Stange 2017), while it favors first person subjects in all other VPs (Kuha 2004); d) it combines with non-auxiliary verbs much more frequently than with modals (Kuha 2004; roughly 4:1); e) it has a wider collocational range in affirmative uses (Stange 2017) and precedes the tensed verb in simple tenses (Kuha 2004); f) its use is associated with (younger) women (Kuha 2004;Amador-Moreno & Terrazas-Calero 2017;Stange 2017Stange , 2020.…”

“…f) its use is associated with (younger) women (Kuha 2004; Amador-Moreno & Terrazas-Calero 2017; Stange 2017, 2020).…”

“…However, it is not entirely clear what the distribution of characters is in the various soap operas, so the data could well be skewed to begin with. A non-exhaustive character list based on previous studies suggests that the number of men and women is balanced, but that younger speakers outweigh older ones by 2:1 (Stange 2017(Stange , 2020. Table 2 provides the number of different characters using preverbal so at least once as well as the ratios of so tokens per character (as a way of normalizing the data, as it were).…”

“…With bare nouns (as in 2) and prepositional phrases (as in 7), we could argue that GenX so is an intensifier because the NP/PP exhibits adjective-like behavior (Gonzálvez-García 2014), while with all other NPs and PPs it rather has an emphasizing function (as in 12, see also 6; Stange 2020).…”

‘I'm so ditching school to babysit.’

“…Two scenarios have been proposed based on introspection: first, the new uses of so were derived from the ordinary intensifier so via expansion in its syntactic range (Zwicky, 2010) and second, so actually modifies a 'silent totally' (silent in the sense that speakers have it in mind but do not realise it in speech) because so totally exhibits the same range in admissible modifiable phrases (see Irwin, 2014 andStange, 2017 for a detailed discussion with sample sentences). While the origins of GenX so remain a matter of debate, it is undisputed that its use is commonly associated with young female speakers (Kenter, Lee & McDonald, 2007;Zwicky, 2011;Amador-Moreno & Terrazas-Calero, 2017;Stange, 2020). Furthermore, it serves to 'indicate [ ] that the speaker is strongly committed to the propositional content' (Potts, 2004: 130).…”