This paper examines the use of intensifiers on the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer in order to establish the ways in which they can be used for characterization. We found that the male and female characters used intensifiers differently (similarly to what is found in natural speech), but also that intensifier choice was related to changes in social networks for several of the female characters on the show (so and totally). Furthermore, intensifiers were also used to distinguish the British characters on the show from the American ones (extremely, terribly, and bloody). By comparing our results to findings for other television shows (Friends) and for natural speech, we were able to establish the extent to which the show makes use of (then) innovative linguistic features for characterization. These findings underline the extent to which scriptwriters and/or actors were able to use linguistic features to index specific types of character.

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This study explores marked affixation as a possible cue for characterization in scripted television dialogue. The data used here is the newly compiled TV Corpus, which encompasses over 265 million words in its North American English context. An initial corpus-based analysis quantifies the innovative use of affixes in word-formation processes across the corpus to allow for comparison with a following character analysis, which investigates how derivational word-formation supports characterization patterns within a specific series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For this, a list of productive prefixes (e.g. de-, un-) and suffixes (e.g. -y, -ish) is used to elicit relevant contexts. The study thus combines two approaches to word-formation processes in scripted contexts. On a large scale, it shows how derivational neologisms are spread across TV dialogue and on a much smaller scale, it highlights particular instances where these neologisms are used to aid character construction.

This study reports on recent changes in the use of the hedges kind of and sort of in spoken British English over the past twenty years. A quantitative analysis of these features within subsets of the original BNC 1994 (BNC Consortium 2007) and BNC 2014 (Love et al. 2017) suggests a systematic encroaching of kind of into contexts that are traditionally occupied by sort of. This is highlighted in apparent-time patterns in which younger speakers are leading in use as well as real-time patterns that show a significant increase in use between 1994 and 2014.The hedges sort of and kind of are often treated as semantically equivalent, yet show distributional differences across different varieties of English. This article reports on an ongoing shift in the use of kind of as well as a relatively stable use of sort of. Its main focus is a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of both variants, which, in addition to social factors involved, teases apart some of the linguistic aspects of this shift.In line with the theme of this special issue, the article draws attention to the usefulness of comparable, or comparably made, corpora that allow for focused studies of linguistic change across speakers, generations, registers and communities.

Corpus pragmatics is an emerging field that, over the past decade or so, has received increasing attention from linguists. The reviewed volume is the first handbook under this sub-discipline, bringing together a multitude of studies investigating pragmatic features with corpus linguistic methods. As such, it is of interest to newcomers to the field of corpus pragmatics on all academic levels as well as scholars from any field that are interested in new approaches. The chapters are great resources on individual pragmatic features and can be used as stand-alone references with the handbook as a whole serving as a remarkable collection of avenues taken within this new discipline. Pragmatics, fully established in the late 1970s, investigates how language is used for communicative purposes. It, therefore, includes foci not on the literal meanings of words and sentences alone, but also on social and cultural readings of the utterances and their speakers. Research within pragmatics usually follows a ''horizontal reading'' of text (further detailed in the introductory chapter, p. 3), meaning close analyses of the immediate linguistic context of an utterance in which it appears as well as broader situational contexts. With such intricate analyses needed, data for pragmatic research has usually been quite limited to very specific text samples. The broad-sweeping comparisons across different texts have hence been difficult. The utterance-context specific interpretations seemingly limited the field to small-scale analyses-that is, until corpus linguistics found ways to not only comprise large amounts of language data, but also offer specialised corpora with sophisticated methods of annotation accommodating to the needs of pragmatics. More and more corpora are constructed that include not just text fragments, but whole texts, providing background information on speakers and listeners, as well as situational and conversational contexts (cf. Chapman 2011: 187). Further, with