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On the Rise and Diffusion of New Intensifiers: This and That in Some Asian Varieties of English

Paper · 2021 · Javier Calle-Martín and Juan Lorente-Sánchez

Summary

The paper looks at how the demonstratives this and that came to work as degree words, as in "this refreshing" or "not that prolific". It also asks how far that use has spread in four outer-circle Asian Englishes. The authors present the change as secondary grammaticalization: a deictic determiner, by way of a "this far / that far" locative stage, turned into a degree adverb. Historically, adverbial that appeared roughly a century before this. The construction then spread widely, mainly in American English, from the late twentieth century.

The data come from four national sections of GloWbE, covering India, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines. For each variety the authors measure how often the intensifiers occur. They then classify the right-hand collocates by word class and by mode of construal, meaning bounded versus unbounded readings.

Main findings:

  • The two words sit at different stages of grammaticalization, and that combines with a broader range of collocates.
  • The spread in these varieties reflects ongoing colloquialization and Americanization.

The study matters for tracing how new intensifiers enter world Englishes.

Key points

  • The corpus is GloWbE (Davies 2013), with about 1.9 billion words from 340,000 websites in 20 countries, gathered in December 2012 and split into "General" and "Blogs" sections.
  • Sizes of the components used:
    • IndE: about 96.4M words
    • SgE: about 43.0M words
    • PhilE: about 43.3M words
    • HKE: about 40.5M words
  • The guiding hypothesis is that a variety's frequency of intensifying this/that shows how far it has moved along the demonstrative-to-adverb path.
  • Collocates are coded for word class and for boundedness, following Paradis's framework.
  • The varieties are placed in Kachru's outer circle and in Schneider's Dynamic Model. IndE, HKE and PhilE are near endonormative stabilization, while SgE is at or past it.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Treat how often a word appears in a newer function as a numeric gauge of how far its reanalysis has gone, and compare that gauge across varieties instead of tagging the word one fixed way.
  • I2. Code what a degree word modifies as bounded or unbounded, since these intensifiers can push a scale onto adjectives that normally have none.
  • I3. Degree this/that points to a specific amount that the hearer is expected to share, such as a gesture, an earlier value, or an expectation. The weak, deaccented form refers to something already in focus.
  • I4. Slice the same corpus by variety and by register (general versus blogs) to see where a construction is spreading.
  • I5. The paper notes that intensifying that is more exact than so, singling out a precise amount.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): Let the tagger score each pre-adjective this/that for degree use versus determiner use, and track that score per register so web and blog text get calibrated tags.
  • I2 (world): When building states from text, mark properties that only became gradable through a modifier, so that comparison and measure reasoning does not treat them as natively scalar.
  • I3 (frames): Resolve "not that X" against an expected or earlier mentioned degree, as a kind of coreference-to-a-value, and record any implied contrast as an implicature.
  • I4 (learn): Run parser and tagger evaluation on matched variety and register slices, so that drops on informal or non-inner-circle English show up rather than being averaged away.
  • I5 (back): During generation, pick that/this when the meaning graph holds an explicit reference degree, and fall back to so or very otherwise.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de MálagaMálaga · Spain3 works · 6 citations

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Javier Calle-Martín and Juan Lorente-Sánchez. 2021. On the Rise and Diffusion of New Intensifiers: This and That in Some Asian Varieties of English. Atlantis 43.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.2.03

@inproceedings{callemartin2021rise,
  title = {{On the Rise and Diffusion of New Intensifiers: This and That in Some Asian Varieties of English}},
  author = {Javier Calle-Martín and Juan Lorente-Sánchez},
  booktitle = {Atlantis 43},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.2.03},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.28914/atlantis-2021-43.2.03}
}

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  53. Received 16 June 2020 Javier Calle-Martín is Professor of English at the University of Málaga, where he teaches history of the English language. His research interests are historical linguistics, world Englishes and manuscript studies. He is the lead researcher of “The Malaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose,” which pursues the compilation of a tagged corpus of Early and Late Modern English scientific prose. find
  54. Juan Lorente-Sánchez holds a BA in English Studies (2016) and an MA in English Studies, Multilingual and Intercultural Communication (2018), both from the University of Málaga. He is currently working on a PhD thesis dealing with the semidiplomatic edition of Glasgow University Library, MS Ferguson 7. His research interests are historical linguistics, world Englishes and manuscript studies. find
  55. Revised version accepted 20 September 2020 find

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