American Speech
SO WEIRD; SO COOL;
SO INNOVATIVE:
THE USE OF INTENSIFIERS IN THE
TELEVISION SERIES FRIENDS
SALI TAGLIAMONTE
CHRIS ROBERTS
University of Toronto
abstract: The use of intensifiers in the television series Friends between 1994 and
2002 provides a unique opportunity to (1) study linguistic innovation in real time
and (2) test the viability of media-based data as a surrogate to “real-world” data in
sociolinguistic research. The Friends data exhibit almost the same overall rate of
intensification as similar studies of contemporary English, and the same intensifiers
occur most frequently: really, very, and so. Frequency of intensifier correlates with its
time origin, reflecting the typical layering of forms in language. Moreover, in Friends
the once primary intensifier in North America, really, is being usurped by so, which
is used more often by the female characters than by the males. Taken together,
these findings support the claim that media language does reflect what is going on
in language and may even pave the way for innovation. Television data can provide
interesting and informative sociolinguistic data for study.
Intensifiers are adverbs that boost or maximize meaning, as in (1).
1. a. I think it is pretty exciting. [Chandler]
b. Oh, Janine, the really hot dancer girl. [Monica]
c. Oh, come on man. You can dance with my partner. She’s real uh- mellow.
[ Joey]
d. Trust me, it was actually- it was very funny. [Rachel]
e. And this is so weird. [Joey]
f. Well, Frank has to quit college because his super fertile sister is having
three babies! [Phoebe]
g. Oh, you’re totally welcome! [Monica]
h. Well, actually, she only did it the one time. But it was pretty weird.
[Phoebe]
i. Look, it is not my fault that your chairs are incredibly ugly! [Joey]
The terminology referring to these types of adverbs is not entirely uniform
among scholars. Stoffel (1901) calls them “intensive adverbs.” Bolinger
(1972, 18) refers to them as “degree words,” and for Quirk et al. (1985,
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Copyright © 2005 by the American Dialect Society
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567) they are “amplifiers” (see also Biber et al. 1999, 554). In other words,
these are adverbs that scale the quality of an adjective or adverb up (Bolinger
1972, 17). Here, we simply refer to them as “intensifiers.”
Intensifiers are a particularly good place to tap into linguistic change
(Ito and Tagliamonte 2003, 257), because they change quickly. According
to Peters (1994, 271), intensifiers are “subject to fashion.” A speaker’s desire
to be original or to enhance the novelty of his or her expressions requires
versatility and color in order to hold the audience’s interest. Given this underlying motivation for intensifier use and renewal, an ideal site for their study
could well be found in popular culture. Indeed, Barthes’s (1957) conception
of pop culture as “neomanic” because of its continual desire for newness is
entirely consistent with what Bolinger (1972, 18) refers to as “fevered invention,” the driving force behind intensifier change. We hypothesized that the
ideal data set might come from television. Indeed, the received wisdom is
that television influences the way we talk. If so, then shows that (1) reach
an extensive audience and (2) command attention in the wider population might be targets for modeling. The long-running, extremely popular
television series Friends seemed the ideal candidate. The present analysis is
exploratory, an experiment to test the potential of television-based data for
sociolinguistic study.
THE FRIENDS DATA
Friends is a comedy about six friends living in New York City—three men and
three women. The comedy follows these characters (Monica, Phoebe, Rachel,
Ross, Joey, and Chandler) through the ups and downs of American life.1
The series is extremely popular both in North America and worldwide.
During its 10-season run, it drew an average of 23.6 million viewers in the
United States alone. Its 66-minute final episode, “The Last One,” which
aired on May 6, 2004, was watched by 52.5 million viewers and ranks as
the fourth-most-watched series finale in television history—topped only by
those of M*A*S*H, Cheers, and Seinfeld (Ginsburg 2004). And its popularity
continues in syndication and DVD box sets.
Since its first season in 1994, Friends has been an influential cultural
phenomenon (Kim 1995, 108). It is championed on hundreds of fan sites
across the Internet and has a full-range of merchandise ranging from T-shirts
to coffee mugs. Moreover, the six Friends characters have become focal popculture personalities themselves.
The Friends dialogue was written by numerous screenwriters over its
10-year history. However, what is ultimately said by the actors in the aired
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version of the shows is the product of innumerable rewrites, involving not
only the original writer who is credited with the first draft, but all the other
writers, and, critically, the actors. Indeed, the actors on Friends play a central
role in the construction of their characters’ dialogue (The One That Goes
behind the Scenes 1999).
This article explores a number of questions: Can one of America’s most
popular television sitcoms tell us what is going on in the language? Can such
media data provide an informative window on language change? Moreover,
given the level of popularity of the series, might we expect the style it embodies to represent a relatively contemporary form of American English?
HISTORY OF INTENSIFIERS
We begin by situating this study within the history and development of intensifiers in English more generally. Figure 1 gives a summary of popular
intensifiers over the centuries. If we go back to the twelfth century, the
intensifier swiπe, as in (2), was the most frequent intensifier. Eventually swiπe
was supplanted by well, as in (3). Well was then replaced by full, as in (4),
which was in turn replaced by right (Mustanoja 1960, 319–27), as in (5).2 Of
course, as new intensifiers come to the fore, the old ones do not disappear.
Indeed, as pointed out by Ito and Tagliamonte (2003, 277), intensifiers
that have been attested from as early as Old English can still be part of the
contemporary repertoire. This extraordinary continuity is consistent with
the grammaticalization literature, in which old forms and meanings have
been traced back over a millennium or more (Traugott and Heine 1991;
figure 1
Summary of Shift in Popularity of Intensifiers in English
(abstracted from Mustanoja 1960, 319–28)
Old English Middle
12th 13th 14th
swiπe
well
full (2nd to swiπe)
1250
right
pretty
very
really
15th
Early Modern
Modern
16th 17th 18th 19th 20th
note: This figure does not show how long the intensifiers persist in the language, but
provides only an overview of when and how long they were the most frequent.
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Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994). When viewed in this way, the longitudinal
cycling of intensifiers becomes apparent.
2. Bute a mayden swiπe fayr
‘but a maiden very fair’
[The Lay of Havelok the Dane, c. 1280; ed. Walter W. Skeat, 2nd ed., rev. K. Sisam
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1915), line 111 (cited in Mustanoja 1960, 325)]
3. Engelond his a wel god lond
‘England is a very good land’
[Robert of Gloucester, Metrical Chronicle, 1297; from Robert of Gloucester’s
Chronicle, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford), line 1 (cited in OED2)]
4. And Frensh she spak ful faire and fetisly
‘and French she spoke very fairly and prettily’
[Geoffrey Chaucer, “General Prologue,” Canterbury Tales, c. 1386; from The
Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, Mass.: Houghton
Mifflin, 1957), line 124 (cited in Mustanoja 1960, 319–20)]
5. But ye hym myssid right sone.
‘but you him missed very recently.’
[Cursor Mundi, c. 1450; ed. Richard Morris et al., 3 vols. (London: Early
English Text Society, 1874–92), line 17413 (cited in OED2)]
Very, as in (6), and pretty, as in (7), come in as intensifiers in the sixteenth
century. Really, as in (8), is a newcomer in the eighteenth century and thereafter very and really coexist as popular intensifiers for a long time.
6. He was a verray parfit gentil knyght. [Geoffrey Chaucer, “General Prologue,”
Canterbury Tales, c. 1386; from The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N.
Robinson (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), line 72 (cited in Mustanoja 1960, 326)]
7. pretie hardie felow: vsed in derision. [Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus linguæ
Romanæ and Britannicæ (London, 1565) (cited in OED2)]
8. This last Bill was really frightful. [Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year,
1722; repr. as The History of the Great Plague in London (London: Noble, 1754),
5 (cited in OED2)]
Labov (1984, 44) observes that really is “one of the most frequent markers
of intensity in colloquial conversation” in American English. It is reported to
be the most common premodifier of adjectives among teenagers in London
(Stenström 1999) as well as in young, informal usage in the British National
Corpus (Lorenz 2002, 153). It is the most frequently used intensifier in
the vernacular speech of the city of York, England, circa 1997 (Ito and
Tagliamonte 2003) and in Canadian English circa 2003–4 (Tagliamonte
2004). The use of so as an intensifier is attested in the early 1900s (Stoffel
1901), and Fries (1940) mentions it along with the use of pretty and real.
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CONSTRAINTS ON INTENSIFIER USE AND DEVELOPMENT
What underlies change in intensifier use over time, which speakers lead the
change, how does it happen, and why?
external constraints. Intensifier use has long been associated with colloquial and nonstandard usage (Stoffel 1901, 122; Fries 1940, 204–5). Fries
calls pretty, really, and so “vulgar,” referring to their use in everyday spoken
English; very, on the other hand, he considers standard English. Partridge
(1970) calls so “a weak and slovenly form of expression.” According to him,
much or very is preferable.
Intensifier use is associated with women. Jespersen (1922, 250) notes that
“the fondness of women for hyperbole will very often lead the fashion with
regard to adverbs of intensity.” Certain intensifiers are even thought to be
specifically “female” (Key 1975, 75). For example, in the eighteenth century,
Lord Chesterfield noted the novel use of vastly by women (Jespersen 1922,
249–50). Stoffel (1901, 101), writing at the turn of the twentieth century,
claimed that the use of so in particular is “purely feminine.” More recently,
Lakoff (1973, 15) referred to so as a noncommittal, characteristically female
intensifier. Further, intensifier use by women is thought to correlate with the
putative female proclivity for “emotional” topics (Roger Shuy, pers. comm.,
Jan. 13, 2004). However, whether women use these forms more than men or
whether they simply use more emotion-laden language has, to our knowledge,
never been quantitatively tested in language use.
internal constraints. Words that become intensifiers undergo “delexicalization” (see Partington 1993, 183; Lorenz 2002, 144–46). In this process the
original meaning of the word is gradually lost as it evolves into a marker of
intensification. Delexicalization does not just happen overnight but occurs
in a step-by-step fashion, as illustrated in figure 2. First, an originally lexical
word is occasionally used for scaling up the quality of an adjective or adverb.
In the next stage it is used more frequently for emphasis and intensification
and concomitantly with a wider and wider range of adjectives. The more
delexicalized an intensifier becomes, “the more it will lose its lexical restrictions and increase in frequency” (Lorenz 2002, 144).
DATA AND METHODS
The corpus upon which this research was conducted comes from unofficial
transcripts of the Friends programs that were readily available on the Internet.3
These materials provide a goldmine of intensifiers, as in (1) and (9a)–(9g).
Some of the intensifiers are decidedly unique, as in (9h).4
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figure 2
Delexicalization Process
Lexical Word
Used for Occasional Emphasis
Used More Frequently
Used with Wider and Wider Range of Words
[concomitantly original lexical meaning gradually lost]
9. a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
No, I wanna live with the super hot Australian dancer. [Joey]
Wow! That ripped. That ripped real nice! [Chandler]
I gave him an extremely professional massage. [Rachel]
I was dead silent. [ Joey]
You guys are being way over protective. [Chandler]
She sounded pretty upset to me. [Monica]
It turns out he’s incredibly sensitive. [Phoebe]
I mean, isn’t that just kick-you-in-the-crotch, spit-on-your-neck
fantastic? [Rachel]
One of the problems inherent in studying intensifiers accountably and
quantitatively is circumscribing the variable context. It is an easy task to find
the intensifiers themselves, but difficult, if not impossible, to find where they
could have occurred, but did not. Because adjectives are the most commonly
intensified forms in language (Bäcklund 1973, 279), we selected this context
for our study. Thus, we circumscribed the variable context to all adjectival
heads. The second author sifted through every episode from the first eight
seasons of Friends, covering the period 1994–2002,5 extracting each adjective that was capable of being intensified, whether it was intensified or not.6
Using this as a baseline enabled us to approach the use of intensifiers and
their lexical forms with a consistent denominator, namely all intensifiable
adjectives. For further detail on the motivation for this method see Ito and
Tagliamonte (2003, 262–64).7
Thus, for example, the intensifiers really, very, and so modifying the adjective sorry in (10) were included as were the adjectives in (11), which are
not modified. Further, examples of the intensifier really in (12) were not
included because it intensifies a verb or an adverb.8
10. a.
b.
c.
d.
Oh, dude I’m so sorry! [ Joey]
I’m real sorry for whatever I did to you in high school. [Rachel]
I am so so sorry. [Chandler]
Look, I’m really sorry I let go of the bike. [Ross]
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11. a.
d.
12. a.
b.
c.
I’m Ø sorry you lost your money. [Rachel]
I’m Ø sorry, man. [ Joey]
She really likes it when you rub her neck. [Joey]
Really well. Yeah, surprisingly well. Yeah, she didn’t cry. [Monica]
All right Ross, I just have to do one thing really quickly. [Chandler]
Then each adjectival context was systematically coded following the
procedures outlined in Ito and Tagliamonte (2003) in order to ensure comparability between the two data sets.9 Accordingly, all negatives, as in (13a),
questions, as in (13b), adjectives that were part of a name, as in (13c), and
all comparatives and superlatives, as in (13d) and (13e), were excluded.
13. a.
b.
c.
d.
She’s really not happy about it. [Monica]
Are you alright? [speaker unknown]
Ugly Naked Guy got a Thighmaster! [speaker unknown]
Wow, it is funny these halls look smaller than they used to. [speaker
unknown]
e. Don’t let the best door in the world hit you in the ass on your way out!
[speaker unknown]
This procedure not only gives us an accountable variable context for the
study but also one which exactly parallels the analysis of British English in
Ito and Tagliamonte (2003). This comparison, alongside consultation with
the findings of studies of London Teenage Talk (Stenström 1999, 2000) and
new research on Canadian English (Tagliamonte 2004), provides a check on
the relationship of the Friends material to current English usage.
RESULTS
distributional analysis. We ended up with over 9,000 intensifiable adjectives. Most adjectives had varying proportions of intensification and different intensifiers. Moreover, there was variation in the intensifiers that were
used both across speakers and with the same speaker in the same stretch of
discourse, as can be observed in the examples in (14).
14. chandler: Look, we’ve always talked about having babies someday. I’m
not saying it has to be right now, but I’m starting to think that we can
handle it. We’re Ø GOOD. We’re really good.
monica: We are pretty good.
Many adjectives that could be intensified never were (e.g., ridiculous and
excellent), as in (15).
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15. a. This was Ø ridiculous. We’re gonna flip a coin! All right?! Heads!
[Rachel]
b. Eva, we’ve done some Ø excellent work here. [Joey]
Others, such as okay (1%), fine (1%), and right (2%), as in (16), hardly ever
occurred with intensifiers.
16. a. It is okay, the duck’s using our bathroom anyway. [Chandler]
b. She seems fine now. [Phoebe]
c. Yes, of course, absolutely! You’re right. [Rachel]
In order to focus on the mechanism governing the choice of intensifier,
we removed any adjectives which remained bare more than 95% of the time.
This left us with 8,611 intensifiable adjectives.
Delimiting the variable context in this way, the overall rate of intensification is 22%. This is remarkably similar to the overall rate of intensification
in contemporary British English, which Ito and Tagliamonte (2003) found
to be 24%.
However, the more important question, given what we know about the
changing status of intensifiers, is which intensifiers are being used? Table 1
shows the frequency of intensifiers that occurred 10 times or more. We note
that a small proportion of the adjectives, 4.8%, had double intensification of
so, very, and really, as in (17). The same patterning can be found as far back
as Old English (Méndez-Naya 2003).
17. a.
b.
c.
d.
Look, I am so, so happy for you guys. [Rachel]
You seem really, really nice. [Rachel]
I am very, very sorry. [Ross]
Look, I am totally, totally over her, ok? [Ross]
If we now compare the lexical forms and frequency of the main intensifier
cohort in table 1 to the findings in Ito and Tagliamonte’s (2003, 266) study
of contemporary British English in table 2, we see some notable similarities.
table 1
Frequency of Intensifiers by Lexical Item in the Friends Corpus
so
really
very
pretty
totally
All other itensifiers
total
832 (44.1%)
464 (24.6%)
269 (14.2%)
115 (6.1%)
53 (2.8%)
153 (8.1%)
1,886
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table 2
Frequency of Intensifiers by Lexical Item in British English
(N ≥ 10; from Ito and Tagliamonte 2003, 266)
very
really
so
absolutely
pretty
All other items
total
364
287
96
30
30
143
950
(38.3%)
(30.2%)
(10.1%)
(3.2%)
(3.2%)
(15.1%)
The same three intensifiers are predominant—very, really, and so. However,
there is at least one critical difference in their ranking. In the British data,
very is the most popular intensifier; whereas in the Friends data, so is by far
the front-runner, representing nearly half of all the intensifiers used.
Previous research gives very as being the most common intensifier in the
United States in the 1940s (Fries 1940, 201), and really is cited as the most
frequent marker of intensity in colloquial conversation in the 1980s (Labov
1984, 44). Furthermore, a new study of contemporary Canadian English
(Tagliamonte 2004) corroborates these observations, showing that really and
very are the most frequently used intensifiers in this variety. What makes the
Friends material stand out is the fact that so is in first place.
The frequency of each intensifier in the Friends data implies a trajectory of change that we might expect given the first attestations of their use
as intensifiers. Very is the oldest, attested from the fifteenth century. In the
Friends data, it is present, but at a relatively low frequency. Really, which enters
during the seventeenth century and is cited as the most common intensifier
in British and American English, here appears more frequently than very.
So, on the other hand, is the most recently attested intensifier. In the Friends
data, it occurs more often than either very or really. Thus, the Friends data
may reflect the next phase in the changing intensifiers of English; very gave
way to really, which now may be giving way to so:
Intensifier change in the twentieth–twenty-first century: very
really
so
Both the British (Ito and Tagliamonte 2003) and Canadian (Tagliamonte
2004) data reveal that so is accelerating among the youngest generation.
A well-known aspect of linguistic change, Labov’s Principle II (1990,
210–15), states, “In change from below, women are most often the innovators.” Taken along with the observations that women generally tend to use
more intensification, we can predict that women may lead the changes in the
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use of nonstandard intensifiers, and we know from earlier linguistic observation that really and so are considered nonstandard in contrast to very.
If we consider the use of so, really, and very in Friends according to sex of
the speaker, as in figure 3, we can clearly see that the female characters use
so far more frequently than the male—in fact, more than twice as often. The
females also use more really than the male; however, both male and female
speakers use very equally. The overall frequency of so as well as its correlation
with the females provides evidence that it is an incoming change.
The correlation of women with intensifiers may also be the result of the
fact that women use more emotional language than men. We can provide
at least a cursory test of this hypothesis in these data by categorizing each
of the adjectives according to whether it encodes an emotion, as in (18), or
physical attributes or other qualities, as in (19).
18. a. I’m so jealous you’re all going! I can’t believe I never knew that you
can’t fly in your third trimester. [Phoebe]
b. Y’know, I’m so glad I picked you to help me with this. [Chandler]
c. I realized that I was more turned on by this gravy boat than by Barry!
And then I got really freaked. [Rachel]
19. a. Chandler but this- this is really important to me. [Ross]
b. You kid is seven? He’s really small. [Phoebe]
c. Okay, let’s say I bought a really great pair of shoes. [Phoebe]
Figure 4 shows the distribution of intensification by male and female speakers with emotional versus nonemotional adjectives.
Female characters use more so on emotional adjectives, 27%, than nonemotional adjectives, 12%. However, the male characters do as well; compare
13% to 6%. In fact, the males also use more very with emotional adjectives.
Thus, it appears that the use of so is tied to emotional language as well as to
Percentage Intensification
figure 3
Distribution of Intensifiers by Sex in Friends
14
12
Females
Males
10
8
6
4
2
0
so
really
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Percentage Intensification
figure 4
Distribution of Intensifiers by Sex and Adjective Quality in Friends
30
Males, emotional adjective
Males, neutral adjective
Females, emotional adjective
Females, neutral adjective
25
20
15
10
5
0
so
really
very
female speakers. However, this correlation is quantitative, not qualitative.
The same tendency for use of intensifiers with emotional language is found
among the male characters. Nevertheless, the extremely heightened use of
so by females is notable.
The data in the Friends material also represent eight years in real time with
the same actors, all of whom are adults. According to standard sociolinguistic
theory then, their vernacular should be relatively stable (as discussed in Bailey
(2002, 320). However, if intensifiers change rapidly and the change is driven
by fashion as researchers claim (e.g., Peters 1994), perhaps this media data
may lend some insight as to how changes in intensifiers take place.
Figure 5 plots the distribution of intensifiers by proportion across the
eight seasons of Friends in our corpus. The characters’ use of intensifiers
changes little over time. Indeed, the use and proportion of the two major
intensifiers—really and very—are quite stable. Even so maintains its higher
level frequency throughout. However, the frequency of so shows an unusual
pattern, rising in seasons 3, 4, and 5, then receding, and finally exhibiting
another up swing in season 8.
In summary, the distributional analysis thus far has shown that the three
most frequently used intensifiers in the speech of the Friends characters
(very, really, and so) are also the top three intensifiers cited in studies of contemporary spoken English. Moreover, the variety of English that the Friends
characters are modeling is stable across time; only so changes. We will return
to this observation later.
For now, we focus on the other internal factors that may influence intensification. First, adjective frequency. Does the frequency of a particular
adjective have an effect on the particular intensifier used? In other words,
could the use of particular intensifiers—in this case so—be the result of the
high frequency of certain adjectives in the data at certain points in time?
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figure 5
Distribution of Intensifiers by Season (1994–2002) in Friends
Percentage Intensification
12
so
really
very
10
8
6
4
2
0
1
2
3
4
Season
5
6
7
8
Figure 6 shows the results of a variable rule analysis (Rand and Sankoff
1990) modeling the likelihood of each intensifier with adjectives of different frequencies: those that occur more than 600 times (e.g., good, great,
sorry); more than 100 times (e.g., bad, big, cool, crazy, cute, fat, funny, happy,
nice, stupid, weird); more than 30 times (e.g., amazing, beautiful, horrible, hot,
huge, interesting, old, sick, serious, sweet); more than 10 times (e.g., glad, huge,
sick); and less than 10 times (e.g., geeky, murky, rough, unfair). In this figure
the probabilities indicate the likelihood of the intensifier occurring in each
context. Anything over 0.5 is considered favoring; those below 0.5 are considered disfavoring. The bars which protrude above the midline indicate
that the intensifier was favored with these adjectives. Very, despite its relative
rarity, is the most general. It appears with the broadest range of different
adjectives. This is what we might expect from an older variant. Really, on
figure 6
Probability of Intensifiers with Adjectives of Different Frequencies
0.8
so
Probability
0.7
really
very
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
>600
>100
>30
>10
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the other hand, is favored with the most frequently occurring adjectives—a
profile which is consistent with the fact that it is the most pervasive intensifier in North American English today. However, so occurs particularly with
adjectives occurring over 30 times [favored at 0.62]. In other words, so is
favored with adjectives that are neither the most common nor the most unusual or marked forms. This is consistent with the profile of a new, incoming
intensifier, which would be expected to have specific collocations first and
then diffuse across a broader and broader range of adjectival heads (Lorenz
2002, 144; Méndez-Naya 2003, 375).
However, grouping adjectives according to their frequency may mask
individual lexical preferences for one intensifier or the other. For example,
Lorenz (2002, 155–56) noted that certain collocations are more frequent
than others. He found that in British English, really collocated most frequently
with good, bad, nice, funny, cool, sad, and weird. Table 3 shows that in the Friends
corpus, bad, nice, and good are intensified most often with really. The adjectives
cool, weird, and funny are intensified most often with so. This too is consistent
with an incoming form; it is localized to particular adjectives.10
However, recall that so’s trajectory across the eight years of our corpus
was rather unusual, particularly for an incoming form which according to
standard sociolinguistic theory might be expected to increase incrementally
over time (Chambers 2003), as opposed to the rising and falling pattern
visible in figure 5.
In fact, when we checked the OED2, we found that there are examples of
so (originally swa) as an intensifier as far back as Beowulf, as in (20a). Moreover, examples of so as an intensifier can be found through the centuries,
as can be seen in (20b) and (20c). Interestingly, however, the example in
table 3
Adjective-Intensifier Collocation in Friends and COLT
(Lorenz 2002, 155–56)
Adjective
bad
nice
good
cool
weird
funny
Most Common Intensifier
Friends
COLT a
really (11%)
really
really (9%)
really
really (9%)
really
so (20%)
really
so (15%)
really
so (11%)
really
a. The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) is a large English
corpus focusing on the speech of teenagers. It was collected in 1993 and consists
of the spoken language of 13- to 17-year-olds from different boroughs of London
(see Stenström, Andersen, and Hasund 2002).
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Use of Intensif iers in Friends
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(20d) is the most recent one listed. There are no examples from the twentieth century.
20. a. ¸if he us Ωeunnan wile, πæt we hine swa godne gretan moton. [Beowulf;
ed. Julius Zupitza (London: Early English Text Society, 1882), lines
346–47]
b. πe empire, πat was swa mighty, Es now destruyed a grete party. [Richard
Rolle of Hampole, The Pricke of Conscience, c. 1340; ed. Richard Morris
(Berlin: Philological Society, 1863), line 4073]
c. My dear brother is so good. [Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of
the Pickwick Club (London: Chapman and Hall, 1837), iv]
d. I am so glad (as the Gushingtons say) that you like the Carlyle. [Edward
FitzGerald, 1875; Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald, ed.
William Aldis Wright (London: Macmillan, 1889), 1: 369]
So has actually been around for over a thousand years. However, as far
as we can tell, its use as an intensifier was not commented on until Stoffel
in 1901. We conclude therefore that its rise in frequency to become one
of the most highly used intensifiers is quite new. But what can explain its
rise and fall in this eight-year time period? The pattern may be due to the
disproportionate representation of a particular adjective. However, when
we checked the individual adjectives over the eight-year period, we found
that the intensification of all adjectives by so rises and falls at about the
same time. In order to pursue the fluctuation of so further we turned to
multivariate analysis.
multivariate analysis. The next section reports analysis by adjective frequency, sex, and adjective quality of three different points on the trajectory
of so’s ebb and flow of frequency across the eight seasons: (1) season 1 and
2 (when the use of so is lowest); (2) season 4 and 5 (when it is the highest);
and (3) season 6 and 7 where the frequency falls quite dramatically.11 Table
4 outlines the predictions for increasing delexicalization of intensifiers. If
so is undergoing delexicalization, we expect it to exhibit decreasing sex correlates and an expanding adjectival inventory. Table 5 shows the sex and
diffusion measures of delexicalization on the Friends corpus in real time
between 1994 and 2001, as well as the factor of adjective quality.
Speaker sex is statistically significant for the use of so in every season.
In each case females favor the use of so. However, in the early seasons of
Friends, this effect is paramount. It is the strongest effect, with a range of 21.
In contrast, the two later seasons show that the sex effect is secondary—the
ranges here are 16 and 14, respectively. Thus, although the effect remains
constant (females favor the use of so), there is a change in the relative
strength of the factor groups. Sex becomes a lesser effect, and therefore
weakens over time.
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table 4
Summary of Predictions for Increasing Delexicalization of Intensifiers
sex
diffusion
Initial
Females use more
than males
Occurs with particular adjectives
Intermediate
Lessening of female
dominance
Occurs with increasingly
wider range of
adjectives
Later
Neutralization of
of sex differences
Extends across all
adjectives
table 5
Multivariate Analysis of Intensifier so by Season
Seasons 1 & 2
.07
1,888
FW %
Corrected Mean
Number
adjective frequency
>600
(good, great, sorry)
>100
(bad, big, cool, crazy, cute,
fat, funny, happy, nice,
stupid, weird)
>30
(amazing, beautiful,
horrible, old, sweet, etc.)
>10
(huge, glad, sick, etc.)
<10
(geeky, murky, rough,
unfair, etc.)
Range
sex
Female
Male
Range
adjective quality
Emotional
Neutral
Range
Seasons 4 & 5
.11
2,195
FW %
Seasons 6 & 7
.08
2,270
FW %
N
8,611
.48
8
.54
13
.42
6
1,964
.50
8
.53
12
.43
6
1,798
.63
14
.61
16
.64
13
1,535
.46
8
.38
7
.47
7
2,679
.47
7
.47
10
.66
14
635
16
23
24
.65
.34
21
13
4
.58
.42
16
7
4
.57
.43
14
10
6
4,376
4,235
[.49]
[.50]
10
9
.69
.49
20
25
11
.69
.49
20
21
7
518
4,301
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Next, consider the effect of adjective quality. In seasons 1 and 2 there
is no effect. By contrast, in seasons 4 and 5 and seasons 6 and 7, emotional
adjectives favor the use of so at 0.69. Further, in the later seasons the emotional quality of the adjectival head contributes a much stronger effect on
intensifier use than sex of the speaker, showing that in the later years the
emotional tone of the dialogue is actually a better predictor of intensifier
use than the sex of the speaker.
Next, we consider the effect of adjective frequency. In the earliest seasons
so is favored in only one category—the adjectives that occur more than 30
times at 0.63. Everywhere else it is disfavored. In contrast, in seasons 4 and
5 when use of so is greatest, it is favored across the most adjective types (see
shading). Importantly, the contexts where it occurs most often are with all
of the most frequently occurring adjectives in the corpus. Now, consider
seasons 6 and 7 where the use of so declines. Here, so is used with the same
adjective types as in seasons 1 and 2. However, there is a difference: in seasons 4 and 5, so occurs with highest frequency among the frequent adjectives
(those occurring more than 30 times), while in seasons 6 and 7, so is favored
particularly with the lowest frequency adjectives. In other words, despite the
decrease in use overall, so is being used with a greater number of different
adjectives. In other words, it is more diffused.
These results relate to the stages of delexicalization of intensifiers. First,
lessening of the sex effect occurs in real time. Second, diffusion of so across
a broader range of adjectives occurs in real time, and this despite the wane
in frequency of so in seasons 6 and 7. Thus, so has all the indications of an
incoming, delexicalizing intensifier. However, we still do not have an explanation for its strange curvilinear pattern in real time. What was going on in
the 1999–2000 period that would explain this curious trajectory?
Televised media material is subjected to relentless scrutiny by corporate
marketing firms, which measure and quantify the amount of audience attention. Consideration of the Nielsen ratings for seasons 1–8 provides an
interesting perspective. The height of so use was seasons 4 and 5, and season
5 was the very year that Friends rose to become the number 2 television series
in the United States, as table 6 illustrates. The popularity of Friends actually
declines dramatically almost immediately thereafter. Interestingly, the drop
in use of so over the next two seasons corresponds to a decline in the ratings
for Friends as well. It drops to number 5 in seasons 6 and 7. It is only in the
2001–2 season that Friends regains popularity, becoming the number one
televison series in the United States. Notice that this is precisely when so is
on the increase again.
It appears that there is some kind of a correlation between the use of so
and the popularity of the television series. Undoubtedly, there are all kinds
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table 6
Neilsen Ratings for Friends
(Sitcoms Online 2002–4)
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5
Season 6
Season 7
Season 8
1994–1995
1995–1996
1996–1997
1997–1998
1998–1999
1999–2000
2000–2001
2001–2002
#9
#3
#4
#4
#2
#5
#5
#1
of other factors involved here. Our point is that the particular acceleration
and deceleration of use of this intensifier seems to tap in to the rising and
falling popularity of the show. Intensifiers pattern with popularity. Apparently, Peters’s (1994, 271) claim that intensifiers shift and change because
of speakers’ desire to “capture the attention of their audience” is even more
true than he imagined.
DISCUSSION
The Friends data exhibit almost the same overall rate of intensification as
similar studies of contemporary English language and the same intensifiers
occur most frequently—really, very, and so. Moreover, there is a correlation of
frequency of intensifier and its time of origin, reflecting the typical layering
of forms in language. Finally, the ranking of external and internal constraints
is also parallel. This evidence leads us to the conclusion that media language
actually does reflect what is going on in language, at least with respect to the
form, frequency, and patterning of intensifiers.
Perhaps more interesting is the fact that this type of medium in particular
provides a kind of preview of mainstream language. In fact, these media data
appear to pave the way; language is more innovative in the media than in the
general population. If the use of intensifier so on Friends is any indication, so
is the new favorite in American English. The once primary intensifier really
in North America is being usurped. Consistent with an incoming linguistic
feature that is not part of the standard language, the female Friends characters
use so more often than males. This result is entirely consistent with earlier
observations that so is a “female” intensifier. Yet the results for adjective quality
reveal that the emotional nature of the dialogue is more important.
These results suggest that the use of intensifiers may be undergoing
rapid change in North American dialects, consistent with the longitudinal
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recycling of intensifiers in the English language. There is a correlation
between adjective type and frequency and intensifier frequency—the older
intensifiers are more diffuse, occurring across a broad range of adjectives,
while so is much more circumscribed. Although intensifier so is not entirely
new, its accelerated frequency and stages of diffusion across adjectives in the
Friends material suggest that it is currently on an upswing.
Finally, we suggest that television data actually provide interesting and
informative sociolinguistic data for dialect study, despite the obvious drawbacks. Moreover, media language is readily available and in the case of a longrunning show like Friends, an extensive corpus of considerable diachronic
depth can be obtained without the time, effort, and funding required to
collect traditional sociolinguistic corpora. When this type of data is used in
conjunction with the results from more traditional studies, as it was here, it
becomes a worthwhile target of investigation. Of course, further study will
be important to determine just how far the use of such data can go.
Most speculatively, we suggest that the use of popular, incoming linguistic
features such as intensifiers like so do indeed make dialogue more appealing.
In fact, the ebb and flow of this intensifier shows how very subject to fashion it is. The highest popularity ratings for Friends correspond to the times
when the characters use the most so. Thus, the idea that intensifiers serve to
“capture the attention of their audience” (Peters 1994, 271) seems to have a
practical application. At the very least, the inextricable link between language
and society—often self-evident for sociolinguists and dialectologists—stands
out in this icon of pop culture.
NOTES
This research was first presented at the American Dialect Society Annual Meeting in
Boston, January 10, 2004. We would like to thank the audience for their comments
and suggestions for revisions to this research, including Michael Adams, Janet Fuller,
and Walt Wolfram. We are particularly grateful for extended discussions with Roger
Shuy and Belén Méndez-Naya. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for American
Speech, who provided insightful commentary.
1.
2.
The frame of reference for Friends is very much middle class as well as highly
circumscribed to a particular sector of the American population. Study of other
sectors of the sociocultural spectrum as well as different media and other genres
would undoubtedly yield interesting comparative data.
A more recent study has revealed that the ordering of the most frequent intensifiers in the history of English was actually swiπe ➝ ful ➝ well and that the
replacement took place somewhat earlier than had been previously suggested
(Méndez-Naya 2003, 389).
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3.
The transcripts used in our corpus were retrieved from http://www.eigo-i.com/
friends/; however, they are no longer available from this site because Warner
Bros. asked that they be removed. Internet sites providing transcipts of Friends
and other television series are disappearing as studios become more aggressive in
protecting their copyrights. At press time, transcripts could still be downloaded
from http://www.friendstranscripts.tk/, but even their administrator warns that
“the future of this site is uncertain.”
4. Interestingly, many of the nonce forms were used by characters other than the
main six (e.g., terribly fascinating, mega jammed, dead silent, wildly unpopular). While
these tokens were initially extracted and coded, they were subsequently removed
from the analysis in an effort to focus on the six main characters for whom most
data are available.
5. In order to control for the possibility of errors in the transcription process,
spot checks were conducted against the versions of the episodes that appeared
on the air. There was a very low rate of deviation overall. More importantly, we
found no cases of missed intensifiers. There were a few instances of adjectives
which had been mistranscribed (including attribution to the wrong speaker),
and we encountered various other small differences, such as added or neglected
monosyllabic words. However, none of these would have affected the contexts
relevant to our study.
6. Cognate forms in non-intensifier functions were not included in this study, as
in “It was so big it couldn’t fit in the door” and “So, what did you do today?”
7. We did not differentiate stressed and unstressed forms of any of the intensifiers
as this was not the focus of our investigation. Such an analysis would require
acoustic analysis in order to reliably differentiate forms.
8. “Gen-X so,” an extended use of the intensifier so, as in I’m so not impressed, occurred only six times. Other nonstandard uses of so, as in I so am, were very rare.
These were not part of the preadjectival context isolated for this study; however,
they certainly warrant further investigation.
9. Two factors not examined here are style and age of the speaker. The former was
not considered due to the difficulty of determining formality in material from a
comedic television show, and the latter because of the similarity of age between
both characters and actors.
10. Just as incoming intensifiers appear in certain collocations, so too will receding
intensifiers. They will be kept longer in particular collocations, to remain there
or to eventually disappear (Méndez-Naya 2003).
11. There are three lines of evidence that can be inferred from table 5 (Poplack
and Tagliamonte 2001, 92–95). The multiple regression incorporated into the
variable rule program assesses which linguistic factors are statistically significant
and which are not. The relative strength of each of the linguistic factors selected
as statistically significant can also be determined by calculating the difference
between the largest and smallest factor weights within a factor. The order (from
more to less) of categories within each of the linguistic factors is also important.
This ranking is referred to as the “constraint hierarchy.” Whether this hierarchy
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reflects the direction predicted by one or the other of the hypotheses being
tested is critical for explaining the results.
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