English Amplifiers in American Television Sitcoms: A Corpus-based Analysis on Friends and How I Met Your Mother

Abstract

Amplifiers are considered one of the most interesting grammatical features to study for their versatility and tendency to change quickly. Amplifiers are also often linked with colloquial usage and female speakers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the competition of different English amplifiers in American television sitcoms in the past decade, the current standings of the selected amplifiers, and whether the television sitcoms reflect the actual amplifier use in contemporary American English. This study also aims to explore the types of adjectives and verbs collocated with the selected amplifiers, and the sociolinguistic correlation between the amplifier use and gender. The transcripts from the two world-popular American television sitcoms were collected to create an original corpus, Friends-HIMYM Corpus, and it was compared with the spoken portion of Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and Corpus of American Soap Operas (CASO). The data was analyzed for chronological distribution, collocation and gender/age-preferential usage of the three selected amplifiers: very, really and totally. The results indicated the amplifier use in the sitcoms partially reflected contemporary American English. Very was the oldest amplifier, followed by really and totally, in all corpora used in the study

however, really was the most popular amplifier for Friends-HIMYM Corpus and CASO while very was most frequently used in COCA and COHA. The results also showed that very and really are collocated with common, scalar adjectives and totally with more complex, prefixed adjectives. Very was never collocated with verbs, really was collocated with auxiliary and cognitive verbs, and totally was collocated with suffixed verbs. All three amplifiers were used more often by female characters than male characters. However, a comparative analysis on MICASE and BNCweb indicated that amplifier preferences varied depending on different gender and age groups in American and British English samples.