{"id":102131,"date":"2016-08-31T10:30:26","date_gmt":"2016-08-31T14:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=102131"},"modified":"2016-08-31T12:38:22","modified_gmt":"2016-08-31T16:38:22","slug":"truly-trending-interview-intensifiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/31\/truly-trending-interview-intensifiers\/","title":{"rendered":"Truly Trending: An Interview on Intensifiers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"William<\/a>

William Blake, Geoffrey Chaucer<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sali Tagliamonte is a linguist at the University of Toronto, where she studies language variation and change. Her latest book, <\/em>Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents<\/a>, was published in June.<\/em><\/p>\n

I called Tagliamonte because I\u2019d noticed more and more people using the word<\/em> truly. All of a sudden it seemed to be everywhere: in work e-mails and movie reviews, in headlines, on Twitter, on Twitter, and on Twitter. \u201cIt truly is up to us,\u201d Hilary Clinton said this summer in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. A week prior, in Cleveland, Trump had remembered his \u201ctruly great mother.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Is <\/em>truly trending? I couldn\u2019t tell\u2014Liane Moriarty\u2019s book, <\/em>Truly Madly Guilty, had just published. There had been that Savage Garden song in the nineties<\/a>, and the Lionel Richie one in the eighties<\/a>. I wanted to find out more, so I did what anyone with a linguistics question would do: I e-mailed Noam Chomsky. To my surprise, he wrote back within half an hour, suggesting I ask \u201can outstanding sociolinguist like William Labov.\u201d So I did. Labov told me, \u201cThe person who has done the most work on intensifiers like truly is Prof. Sali Tagliamonte.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I reached Tagliamonte on a train to Ottawa. She explained that an intensifier is a word that boosts another word\u2019s meaning, like when, in<\/em> Friends, Joey says: \u201cThis is so weird.\u201d <\/em>So amplifies the emotional persuasiveness of the message, but it doesn\u2019t change the factual content. Compare that with this line from <\/em>Beowulf, where <\/em>so is used in a construction and is therefore not really an intensifier but a comparative: \u201cnothing so wise \/ From a warrior so young has ever reached.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"truly\"<\/a>Tagliamonte studies fluctuations in intensifier usage and popularity. According to her paper, \u201cSo Weird; So Cool; So Innovative,\u201d published in <\/em>English Language and Linguistics, we cycle through intensifiers faster than other words. In the twelfth century, she writes, a word we\u2019ve since abandoned, <\/em>swi\u00fee, was the most frequent\u00a0intensifier<\/em>. Walter W. Skeat, for example, described a woman as \u201ca mayden swi\u00fee fayr\u201d in his 1280 edition of \u201cThe Lay of Havelok the Dane.\u201d \u201cEventually,\u201d Tagliamonte continues, \u201c<\/em>swi\u00fee was supplanted by <\/em>well. <\/em>Well was then replaced by <\/em>full, which was in turn replaced by <\/em>right.\u201d Robert of Gloucester\u2019s <\/em>Metrical Chronicle, from 1297, states \u201cEngelond his a wel god lond.\u201d About a century later, Chaucer, in the \u201cGeneral Prologue\u201d to his <\/em>Canterbury Tales, describes a woman who speaks French \u201cful faire and fetisly,\u201d and a guy as \u201ca verray par\ufb01t gentil knyght.\u201d By 1900, a few centuries later, <\/em>really appeared in print more often than <\/em>very, <\/em>pretty, and <\/em>right. \u201cIntensifiers,\u201d Tagliamonte says, \u201care like fashion\u2014they evolve often and, compared to the words they modify, very quickly.\u201d I asked her a few questions about them.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Have you noticed an increase in the use of the word truly<\/em>?<\/p>\n

TAGLIAMONTE<\/p>\n

There\u2019s very little use of it in my material\u2014but that only goes up to 2010. Everything I work with has been collected and transcribed, and we can track language change in there, but we can\u2019t track language change month to month, unless you do it on the Internet\u2014and then, you know, you\u2019d need to filter that material a lot. If you look at Google, and you search for truly<\/em> in the last month, you can see that there are some hits. But whether that actually tells you that it\u2019s trending, or how it\u2019s trending, or who\u2019s using it \u2026 that would have to be a study, and that study has not been done, as far as I know.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What\u2019s an example of a way to track language change?<\/p>\n

TAGLIAMONTE<\/p>\n

We have something called the \u201cToronto corpus\u201d that represents a community with a wide age range, from nine-year-olds to octogenarians. These people are born anywhere from the early 1900s right through to the late eighties, like my youngest kids. You can see on my website\u2014I\u2019ve been tracking various linguistic changes over the last ten years, and it\u2019s astounding how quickly certain systems are changing. What you\u2019re picking up on with your observation about truly<\/em> is that intensifiers tap into vibrant language change, because they are subject to fashion\u2014people pick up on them very easily. I did this study of the TV series Friends<\/em>. At that time, people were starting to use so<\/em> very strongly. And I noticed it, just like you\u2019re noticing people saying truly.<\/em> I thought the best way to look at it would be to look at the most popular sitcom ever, right? We showed that the characters on this show were actually pushing the frequency of so<\/em> usage forward very strongly.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019re saying there\u2019s actual feedback between the characters and the audience?<\/p>\n

TAGLIAMONTE<\/p>\n

Yes. The data shows us that language changes in these very strong ways depending on what people think is cool or trendy. Intensifiers are a great way to track that\u2014they are a litmus test for language change. And if you can show that it\u2019s the young women that are picking up on this trend, then that\u2019s another indicator of linguistic change. Because we know that women lead when it comes to linguistic change, 95 percent of the time.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is that a real statistic?<\/p>\n

TAGLIAMONTE<\/p>\n

Yeah, it\u2019s real. People have replicated that finding over and over again in many studies all over the world. Women are the ones who push language forward. In my Friends<\/em> study, for example, the women characters were using more of this new intensifier so<\/em> than the guys. It was remarkable. When I did the 2008 study in Toronto, you could see that it was adolescent women, a lot more so than anyone else, who pushed forward that intensifier.<\/p>\n

But an intensifier can only be used so much\u2014and then it\u2019s not intense. You have to pick a new one. That\u2019s why intensifiers are good to track this development. If people keep using it and using it, then it\u2019s not intense anymore. It loses its allure. If all the trendy people are using so<\/em>, for example, but then if everyone starts using it, it\u2019s no longer trendy. So you know Bill Labov\u2014he told you to call me! He\u2019s one of the foremost researchers in how languages changes. He came up with six foundational sociolinguistic principles, one of which says that women lead linguistic changes. Another one is that the middle classes lead linguistic change. People who are central to the community, with links down into the lower classes and up into the upper classes\u2014those are the people who are kind of moving between the layers of society, and they transport the new features of society from one tier to the other, and language spreads in that way. I had one of my students look at intensifiers in Chaucer and it patterns beautifully with the different characters. Dickens is another writer who was very into language\u2014he used language very effectively to depict where his characters were from, lower or upper class.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In your paper, you suggest that the actors themselves were bringing some of the dialogue to the show.<\/p>\n

TAGLIAMONTE<\/p>\n

That was one of the things I argued, that Courteney Cox and the rest of the cast were picking up on this trendy thing outside of the show, and then they kept using it a little bit more. They picked up on what was already in the speech community. Friends <\/em>was so popular, and those actors were so popular, that they actually had quite a lot of license to adapt the dialogue in their own way. Other shows don\u2019t have that\u2014so it was a particularly good show to tap into.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Does the heavy use of intensifiers in the globalized media threaten regional intensifiers?<\/p>\n

TAGLIAMONTE<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not clear. People like to sound like where they come from. You can only push this study so far. You can look at communities\u2014do the young people want to leave that community to live in New York? Then they\u2019re going to try and talk like people in the bigger world. But if they don\u2019t want to leave, they\u2019ll maintain their local words. So if you go to a small town in Nova Scotia, for example, people are saying \u201cright good.\u201d And if you go to small towns across the U.S., they\u2019re probably using different intensifiers than people in New York do. In Chaucer it was well<\/em>, that was \u201cwell good.\u201d I hear my kids saying \u201csuper cool.\u201d So it goes. Every generation has its way of intensifying.<\/p>\n

Peter Nowogrodzki is the nonfiction editor of <\/em>Fence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sali Tagliamonte is a linguist at the University of Toronto, where she studies language variation and change. Her latest book, Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents, was published in June. I called Tagliamonte because I\u2019d noticed more and more people using the word truly. All of a sudden it seemed to be everywhere: in work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1049,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[684],"tags":[16803,1203,4962,24283,2679,1716,529,3007,24278,687,1277,24286,23745,24284,9771,24280,24282,24287,24279,24285,24281],"class_list":["post-102131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-language","tag-change","tag-charles-dickens","tag-chaucer","tag-english-language","tag-english-literature","tag-evolution","tag-french","tag-friends","tag-intensifiers","tag-language","tag-linguistics","tag-lionel-richie","tag-noam-chompsky","tag-on-language","tag-research","tag-sali-tagliamonte","tag-teen-talk-the-language-of-adolescents","tag-trending","tag-truly","tag-truly-madly-guilty","tag-university-of-tornoto"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTruly Trending: An Interview about Intensifiers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I\u2019d noticed more and more people using the word \u2018truly\u2019. 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