The Use of the Adjective Intensifier well in British English: A Case Study of The Inbetweeners

ABSTRACT

In some present-day varieties of British English the adverbial well can function as an adjective intensifier, as in utterances such as it’s well good and it’s well weird. The present study explores the use of this adjective intensifier in the popular British TV show The Inbetweeners in an attempt to shed light on its contemporary use within the last 20 years and provide a more contemporary discussion of its collocational and syntactic distribution in present-day adolescent varieties of British English. The results suggest that this adjective intensifier is used productively, and that the language used in The Inbetweeners is similar to naturally-occurring speech. More broadly speaking, the present study supports the empirical claim that language used in fictional television is a fair representation of what is going on in language.

KEYWORDS:

• British English
• adjective intensifier well
• scripted language
• The Inbetweeners

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the scholars who took the time to read the manuscript and provide useful comments and suggestions. He would particularly like to thank Jian Jiao for his comments on the structure of the paper and Dr. John Sundquist and Dr. Mary Niepokuj for their input during the incipient stages of the article. He would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of a previously submitted manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

James Stratton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7255-5545

Notes

1 In the present study, the term non-standard is used to describe the use of well as an intensifier of regular adjectives with an open scale structure (such as it’s well hot). This term is used due to the fact that it is marked as slang in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), rejected in prescriptive grammars, and previous studies have referred to its use as “non-standard”. Stenström, It’s Funny Enough, 178. However, this binary system is socially complex and problematic. In the present study it is therefore used without socio-political prejudice and merely for descriptive purposes. It is worth noting, however, that well can also intensify participial adjectives such as I am well stressed as well as a limited number of adjectives such as aware and able which have a closed scale structure, both of which are considered Standard English in most varieties of English today.

2 Mustanoja, 319–28.

3 Stenström, It’s Funny Enough, 177–90.

4 Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 158; Méndez-Naya, 377; Ito and Tagliamonte, 278.

5 Mustanoja, 319–28.

6 Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 158; Mustanoja, 323–7; Bolinger, 18; Ito and Tagliamonte, 10; Barnfield and Buchstaller, 254; Tagliamonte, Teen Talk, 92.

7 Paradis, It’s Well Weird; Stenström, It’s Funny Enough; Stenström, Andersen and Hasund; Stenström, He’s Well Nice; Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo, 780.

8 Stenström, It’s Funny Enough, 178.

9 Regular adjectives are those which are not morphologically derived from verbs, unlike deverbal adjectives which are.

10 The transcripts from The Inbetweeners were retrieved from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/episode_scripts.php?tv-show=the-inbetweeners. To ensure the accuracy of the transcripts, each episode and movie was watched closely, with the script, to check for any differences. In doing so, I was also able to add the exact times when the tokens appeared during the shows and movies, as shown in Table 4. The transcripts on www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk do not provide this information. All metadata in the transcripts such laugh or bell rings were omitted from the present analysis. Given that there was no corpus annotation, all tagging of functions and grammatical categories of lexical items had to be carried out manually.

11 Baños, 526; Quaglio, 13.

12 Tagliamonte and Roberts, 296. For more information on the realism of the language used in fictional television, see Berman, How Television Sees Its Audience; Berliner, “Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the ‘Real Realism’”; Bednarek, The Language of Fictional Television; Georgakopoulou, “On the Sociolinguistics of Popular Films”; Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue; Tagliamonte and Roberts, “So Weird; So Cool; So Innovative”; Benz, “Deadwood and the English language”; Quaglio, Television Dialogue; Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi, Telecinematic Discourse; Fägersten, Watching TV with a Linguist; Reichelt and Durham, “Adjective Intensification as a Means of Characterization.”

13 Tagliamonte and Roberts, 296; Friedmann, 228; Quaglio, 13; Berman, 13.

14 Berman, 13; Friedmann, 228; Quaglio, 13.

15 Many people have commented on online message boards, such as Reddit and Quora, about how realistic of a portrayal of adolescent life The Inbetweeners is. Simon Bird, who plays Will (the narrator and one of the protagonists of the show), also told the BBC that the show is a more realistic depiction of teenage life than other television shows (Nissim, More Realistic than Skins).

16 Godwin http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/the-inbetweeners-how-did-we-get-so-lowbrow-9684064.html.

17 Palmer; Macaulay, 598.

18 Stenström, It’s Funny Enough; Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 58.

19 Nissim.

20 Paradis; Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo.

21 Tagliamonte and Roberts; Tagliamonte, So Different and Pretty Cool; Reichelt and Durham; Ito and Tagliamonte.

22 Ito and Tagliamonte, 263.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 263–4.

25 Tagliamonte gives a comparison of the overall rate of intensification across studies. By comparing these results with the rate of intensification in The Inbetweeners, it becomes clear that the intensification in The Inbetweeners is closest to the rate of intensification observed in the study on British English. Tagliamonte, So Sick or So Cool, 21.

26 Bäcklund, 279.

27 Stoffel; Paradis, Degree Modifiers of Adjectives; Bolinger, Degree Words, 18; Quirk et al., 590; Biber et al., 554–5. Terminologically, it is worth noting that Biber et al. also refer to degree adverbs as “amplifiers”: “degree adverbs that increase intensity are called amplifiers (or intensifiers)” (554).

28 Reichelt and Durham, 74.

29 Ito and Tagliamonte, 226; Tagliamonte and Roberts, 287.

30 Ibid.

31 Ito and Tagliamonte; Murphy; Tagliamonte, So Sick or So Cool.

32 Altenberg, 127–47; Reichelt and Durham, 70.

33 Stenström, He’s Well Nice, 142; Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo, 781.

34 Stenström, It’s Funny Enough; Ito and Tagliamonte; Tagliamonte and Roberts; Xiao and Tao; Murphy; Reichelt and Durham.

35 Stoffel, 101; Jespersen, 250; Carli, 941–51; Brown and Tagliamonte.

36 However, the interaction effect between the sex of the speaker and the type of booster F(7, 64) = 0.38, p = .911 was not statistically significant.

37 Ito and Tagliamonte, 274; Tagliamonte and Roberts, 293; Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo, 779.

38 Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 162. Xiao and Tao also found a statistical tendency for males to use bloody more frequently than females in written language (261).

39 Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo, 782; Ito and Tagliamonte, 277.

40 Paradis, Degree Modifiers of Adjectives, 4; Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 4; Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo, 777.

41 Stenström, It’s Funny Enough, 187.

42 Ito and Tagliamonte, 271–3; Macaulay, “Pure Grammaticalization,” 272; Barnfield and Buchstaller, 274; Mustanoja, 326–7; Partington, 183; Tagliamonte, So Different and Pretty Cool, 373.

43 Méndez-Naya, 388.

44 Paradis, It’s Well Weird, 5.

45 Macaulay, “Pure Grammaticalization,” 273.

46 Biber et al., 505–6.

47 McCoy.

48 Gonzálvez-García, 283.

49 Macaulay, “Pure Grammaticalization.”

50 Graham, 369.

51 Barnfield and Buchstaller, 272; Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo, 781.

52 Kennedy’s dissertation on gradability provides a useful section on the diagnostics for gradable adjectives. I am thankful to Ashley Kentner for pointing this out. Typically absolute adjectives (such as racist) have a closed-scale structure and relative adjectives (such as tall and big) have an open-scale structure.

53 Kennedy and McNally, 116; Panfili, 1.

54 The example in (7a) is an example of well modifying racist in real-life naturally-occurring language. Interestingly it is used attributively, which shows that racist can be modified both attributively and predicatively.

55 Morzycki provides a good overview of extreme adjectives.

56 Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo, 781

57 The Log-Likelihood test used in this study was the UCREL log-likelihood wizard created by Paul Rayson.

58 Tagliamonte, “So Different and Pretty Cool!” 377; Barnfield and Buchstaller, 276.

59 Dixon, 31. It should be noted, however, that Dixon has edited his semantic categories since those laid out originally in 1977. However, to ensure comparability of the present study with previous studies on intensifiers, the original taxonomy from 1977 was used in this work. For the newer and updated semantic categories proposed by Dixon, see Dixon, A Semantic Approach to English Grammar; Dixon, Making New Words.

60 Partington, 183; Méndez-Naya, 377.

61 Tagliamonte, So Sick or So Cool, 22.

62 Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 157.

63 Stenström, It’s Funny Enough, 187.

64 A thorough analysis of the spoken component of the BNC also reveals that the adjective intensifier well can be used with other verbs such as to make and to seem, but collocates more frequently with the copula to be.

65 Stenström, He’s Well Nice, 162; Leith, 96. See also Labov, 243; Cameron and Coates, 13.

66 Macaulay, “The Adverbs of Authority,” 42; Macaulay, “Pure Grammaticalization,” 270–7.

67 Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 155–6; Ito and Tagliamonte, 274–5.

68 Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 162.

69 Ibid., 158.

70 Stoffel, 122; Fries, 204–5.

71 Reichelt and Durham.

72 Palacios Martínez and Núñez Pertejo, 781; Stenström, He’s Well Nice, 142.

73 Xiao and Tao, 255.