African American English intensifier dennamug: Using twitter to investigate syntactic change in low-frequency forms

ABSTRACT: There are some linguistic forms that may be known to both speakers and linguists, but that occur naturally with such low frequency that traditional sociolinguistic methods do not allow for study. This study investigates one such phenomenon: the grammatical reanalysis of an intensifier in some forms of African American English—from a full phrase [than a mother(fucker)] to lexical word (represented here as dennamug)—using data gathered from twitter. This paper investigates the relationship between apparent lexicalization and deletion of the comparative morpheme on the preceding adjective. While state-of-the-art traditional corpora contain so few tokens they can be counted on one hand, twitter yields almost 300,000 tokens over a 10 year sample period. This paper uses web scraping of Twitter t

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PROVIDER: S-EPMC9973324 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature