The social life of emotive interjections in spoken British English

This paper explores the discursive use of selected emotive interjections (Ow!, Ouch!; Ugh!, Yuck!; Whoops!, Whoopsadaisy!) in spoken British English. The data (drawn from the Spoken BNC2014) are coded for age, gender, social grade and type of dyad to identify potential factors governing the discursive use of these interjections. Based on 140 relevant tokens, the results suggest that: 1) The individual interjections vary significantly regarding how frequently they are found in discursive uses (p<0.001***). 2) Whoopsadaisy! is not attested in discursive uses. 3) Young female speakers behave differently from the other speaker groups in that they use emotive interjections discursively signif…

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

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 …

“You’re So Not Going to Believe This”:

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

This paper explores the use of so-called GenX so as a modifier of verb phrases, as exemplified in “He should so be in jail” (SOAP, DAYS, 2005). Drawing on over 1350 relevant tokens retrieved from the Corpus of American Soap Operas (SOAP) (Davies 2011-, 100 million words from 2001-2012), the main purpose of the present study is to provide robust empirical evidence for various findings yielded by small-scale studies and by introspection. The results corroborate some of the previous findings, while others, particularly those based on introspection, are challenged in light of empirical (counter)evidence. The data show that preverbal so is very flexible in that it can occur in various syntactic…