Easy unchillig, huere nervig: Corpus Dialectology and the System of Syntactic Intensification in Swiss German

Pheiff, Jeffrey Alan (12 May 2023). Easy unchillig, huere nervig: Corpus Dialectology and the System of Syntactic Intensification in Swiss German (Unpublished). In: Soziolinguistische Perspektiven: Kontakt – Variation – Wandel. Universität Bern. 12.–13.05.2023.

The purpose of this contribution is to investigate syntactic intensification in Swiss German dialects. Intensifiers can be divided into two groups: amplifiers and downtoners. While amplifiers “scale upwards from an assumed norm” as in “it is very warm” and can be divided into two groups depending on their heightening effect, downtoners scale “downwards from an assumed norm” as in “it is a little
warm” and they can be subdivided into four groups depending on their “lowering effect” (vgl. Quirk et al. 1985: 439).

For English, there is an extensive literature on syntactic intensifiers. This research strand has particularly focused on amplifiers (Aijmer 2018, Ito & Tagliamonte 2003, Stratton 2018, 2020, Tagliamonte & Roberts 2005), but downtoners have received increased attention in the last few years (z. B. Claridge, Jonsson & Kytö 2021). With regard to German, Stratton (2020b: 183) notes that “intensification in the German language is underexplored”: Claudi (2006) investigates the semantic-cognitive sources of German amplifiers from a typological perspective. Christen (2003) and Meyer (1968) investigate “intensifying words” (“Verstärkungswörter”) in Swiss German more broadly.

Stratton (2020b) presents an initial variationist approximation to syntactic intensification in German. In his corpus analysis, he finds 45 different adjective intensifiers (= types) across 919 intensified adjectives. He finds that amplifiers occur more often than downtoners and that within the group of amplifiers, boosers (e.g. so, sehr) occur more frequently than maximizers (e.g. voll, total). He also finds that speakers’ gender predicts their use of amplifiers or downtoners. This study will make use of the Jugendsprache Bern Korpus, which is a corpus of speech from young speakers of Bernese Swiss German consisting of 198,474 tokens. This contribution will attempt to describe the system of syntactic intensification in Swiss German, meaning that both amplifiers and downtoners will be the object of analysis, and to answer the following questions:

• Which forms occur in which intensifier function in what frequency?
• Which semantic domains do intensifiers in Swiss German draw from?
• Are Swiss German intensifiers associated with specific adjective semantics and in the event that
an adjective is intensified, do the adjectives occur in specific syntactic contexts?
• Does the occurrence of amplifiers and downtoners depend on social factors such as the gender
of the speaker?

References

Christen, Helen (2003): Uu fein, welts guet und rüüdig schöön. Überlegungen zu lexikalischen Aspekten eines SchweizerDeutsch der Regionen. In: Beat Dittli et al. (eds.): Gömmer MiGro? Veränderungen und Entwicklungen im heutigen Schweizerdeutschen. Freiburg/Schweiz, 25– 38.

Claridge, Claudia, Eva Jonsson & Merja Kytö (2021): A Little Something Goes a Long Way: Little in the Old Bailey Corpus. In: Journal of English Linguistics, 49(1), 61–89.

Claudi, Ulrike (2006): Intensifiers of adjectives in German. In: Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung,
59(4), 350–369.

Ito, Rika & Sali Tagliamonte (2003): Well weird, Right Dodgy, Very Strange, Really Cool: Layering and Recycling in English Intensifiers. In: Language and Society, 32(2), 257–259.

Meyer, Kurt (1968): Über sehr im Schweizerdeutschen. In: Schweizerdeutsches Wörterbuch. Schweizerisches Idiotikon. Bericht über das Jahr 1967. Zürich: 39–58.

Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik (1985): A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman.

Stratton, James (2018): The Use of the Adjective Intensifiers well in British English: A Case Study of The Inbetweeners. In: English Studies, 99(8), 793–816.

Stratton, James (2020): Adjective Intensifiers in German. In: Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 32(2), 183–215.

Tagliamonte, Sali & Chris Roberts (2005): So weird, so cool, so innovative: The use of intensifiers in the television series Friends. In: American Speech, 80(3), 280–300.

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