Very, really, absolutely. The influence of age and sex on the choice of amplifiers

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, course: Language Variation, language: English, abstract: The differences of daily spoken language could be explained by an internally motivated diasystem that explains language differences due to the speaker's geographical, social, and situational context of communication. Obviously, there are several more triggers that lead to a different choice of words, such as the speaker's sex or age. This paper focuses on both of the last aspects, the sex and age, with regard to the choice of amplifiers, which fall into the semantic category of degree. 'Amplifiers scale [gradable units] upwards from an assumed norm', such as a fast car in comparison to a very fast car. Their aim is thus to either enlarge their referring item in space or capacity, or to augment the same in volume or amount. Whilst doing so, they 'indicate [...] a point on an abstractly conceived intensity scale; and the point indicated may be relatively low or relatively high'. Whereas many parts of daily language are not really interchangeable (e.g. lexical items), amplifiers are an exception, as their sense in language is to increase the referring unit. At the same time there are many other possibilities, other amplifiers, that have the same effect. Thus, this leaves room for speakers to individualize their speech, which makes it highly interesting and valuable for social studies at the same time. Those individualizations can be categorized regarding the speaker's age or sex and then evolve to gender or generation discussions. As a consequence, the question whether a so-called 'women's language' exists became one of the focuses of socio-linguistic studies and is to a high degree yet to be answered. Although this possible women's language might also exist in texts, it is much more likely to appear in spoken conversations - same accounts for the age. Thus, in this paper, I am going to analyze the choice of amplifiers in spoken British English by men and women in different ages, which will help to better understand how far the choice of words is determined by the speaker's age and sex.