Canny good, orquite canny?

Abstract

This document may differ from the final, published version of the research and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher's website (a subscription may be required.) Claire Childs (Newcastle University) AbstractThe word canny has long been associated with the dialects of the North East of England, most typically in its adjectival sense. However, it has four distinct functions (adjective, adverb, intensifier and modifier in quantifying expressions), which this paper tracks in a diachronic speech corpus. Although the intensifier (e.g. it's canny good) is documented in the Survey of English Dialects (Upton et al. 1994), it appears in the corpus later than expected with the profile of an incoming form. Results from a judgement task corroborate the corpus trends and show that people's intuitions about intensifier canny correlate with age as well as the semantics and position of the following adjective, in such a way that shows the intensifier is not fully delexicalised. The research highlights the value of combining production and perception data in establishing how the origins of a linguistic item affect its distribution in its new function.Keywords: language change; Tyneside; intensification; grammaticalisation; perception; judgement data; function; frequency 1 I gratefully acknowledge support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and would like to thank Isabelle Buchstaller, Karen Corrigan, Heike Pichler, Jennifer Smith, Jennifer Thorburn and Cathleen Waters for their feedback at various stages, the DECTE team for granting me use of the corpus, and Adam Mearns for additional assistance with the materials. Thank you to the audiences at Sociolinguistics Symposium 20 (Jyväskylä) and the LVC research groups at Newcastle University and the University of Toronto where aspects of this research were presented. I am also very grateful to the editor Marianne Hundt and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.