ACoolComparison: Adjectives of Positive Evaluation in Toronto, Canada and York, England

Abstract

This paper examines variation and change in the adjectives used to express “highly positive evaluation” in the varieties of English spoken in Toronto, Canada, and York, England. Building on earlier work on another semantic field, “strangeness,” we analyze over 4800 tokens and thirty-four different types, as in “That’s great” and “She’s awesome.” Our results show both similarities and differences between these two semantic fields. While individual forms in both fields tend to be popular for a long time, many forms fall in and out of favor. In the case of adjectives of highly positive evaluation, the adjectival set is particularly rich. Distributional analysis and statistical modeling of constraints on the major forms and their underlying social and linguistic correlates reveals that these changes are not progressing in parallel across varieties of English. There are robust linguistic patterns that suggest a systemic underlying explanation. New additions to this field arise in predicative position and as stand-alones, and in a later stage extend to attributive position. Finally, consistent with earlier findings on adjectives and (intensifying) adverbs, there are notable links to social trends and popular culture, affirming the link between open class categories and their sociolinguistic embedding.

Tapping into German Adjective Variation: A Variationist Sociolinguistic Approach

“…However, in addition to the explanatory factors geography and style, lexical variation can also correlate with other external factors such as age. Tagliamonte & Pabst (2020) found that in Toronto English, adjectives such as terrific are favored by older speakers, whereas adjectives such as cool are favored by younger speakers. In contrast, they found that in York English, lovely was the variant favored by older speakers.…”

“…Particular care was taken with the adjective krass 'cool' given that its meaning can be ambiguous as it can also mean 'extreme'. 10 Following previous work (Tagliamonte & Brooke 2014, Stratton 2020b, Tagliamonte & Pabst 2020, negative, comparative, and superlative tokens were excluded since these can alter the functional scale of meaning. 11 Because German adjectives and German adverbs often have no overt morphological difference, adverbs had to be removed manually.…”

“…By operationalizing the notion of a semantic field as the linguistic variable, Tagliamonte & Brooke (2014) and subsequently Stratton (2020b) and Tagliamonte & Pabst (2020) circumscribed the variable context to adjectives that were comparable in meaning (for example, adjectives of strangeness: weird, bizarre, strange and adjectives of positive evaluation: cool, awesome, terrific, dandy). While using a semantic field as the linguistic variable was novel for the study of adjectives, "early work in variationist approaches explored the possibility of using semantic fields as a foundation for circumscribing the variable context for semantic and lexical variables" (Tagliamonte 2016a:169).…”

“…The question of which variants are currently in use is an empirical one, which is addressed in this study. The second reason for focusing on adjectives of positive evaluation is that, as mentioned earlier, there is recent comparable crosslinguistic work (Tagliamonte & Pabst 2020). Given that the authors found both internal and external correlates of variation, it is pertinent to examine whether or not adjectives of positive evaluation exhibit similar constraints in German.…”

“…Since recent variationist work on English adjective variation found age to be a conditioning factor (Tagliamonte & Brooke 2014, Stratton 2020b, Tagliamonte & Pabst 2020, the present study turns to German adjective variation, specifically to the eclectic class of adjectives of positive evaluation, to examine whether similar structured variability can be observed within this semantic field. Doing so provides insight into the factors that shape the choice to use one German adjective over its synonymously equivalent counterparts.…”