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Innovations in the Intensifier System of UK English
from Part II - Innovative Variables in English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2022
The chapter establishes a baseline of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of a “new” totally in UK English in the 2010s, as demonstrated through the BC2014S. It offers a short–term diachronic perspective on the developments of totally, comparing the instances of totally from the BNC2014S with the original British National Corpus. A distinction is made between a lexical (maximizing) category, booster, and emphasizer. In its lexical use, totally can be replaced by completely, the adjective or verb modified by totally is bounded, and the speaker’s perspective is less present. In the emphasizer function, totally co–occurs with an unbounded verb or adjective and can be replaced by certainly. Totally has been regarded as a booster when it combines with gradable adjectives to express a high degree of adjectival property. Totally can stand alone with the function to respond to a previous utterance in the conversation. The semantic development of totally from an intensifier to an emphasizer is an example of subjectification and grammaticalization. As a discourse marker with reactive function, totally becomes integrated into a paradigm of epistemic adverbials. The sociolinguistic findings point to a connection between the semantic or pragmatic properties of totally and young people, especially young females.
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