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Intensifiers of adjectives in present-day spoken British English
Švedová, Zuzana ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The objective of the present thesis is to provide an overview of the usage of adjectival intensifiers in present-day spoken British English. For this purpose the corpus Spoken BNC 2014 was selected as the most suitable studying material. In the theoretical part of the thesis the available information on intensifiers is summarised, both from grammar books and more recent studies. The variation in the usage of intensifiers with respect to different socio-linguistic variables is described and finally, some more detailed characteristics of a few specific intensifiers are mentioned. The practical section of the thesis follows a similar structure to that of the theoretical part. It first includes a list of the 105 most frequently used intensifiers of adjectives in the Spoken BNC 2014. Furthermore, two specific intensifiers, namely quite and pretty, were selected for closer analysis and comparison. The analysed features of the intensifiers are their syntactic environment, collocational patterns and socio-linguistic characteristics of the speakers. key words: intensification, intensifiers of adjectives, spoken British English, syntactic environment, semantic preferences, socio-linguistic characteristics
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