The Use of Adjective Intensifiers by Najdi Dialect Speakers in Riyadh

Abstract

This thesis explores the functional devices used for adjective intensification by Najdi dialect speakers in Riyadh and the linguistic and social parameters conditioning their usage by operationalising a sociolinguistic variationist analysis. This study is one of the first investigating intensifiers in the Najdi dialect. The corpus in this study, which is based on interviews, consists of 148,023 words. Adjective intensifiers in the dataset are categorised according to the model of Quirk et al. (1985). Among the 3,508 adjectives in the data, only 540 (15.39%) were intensified. Within the adjective intensification system of Najdi dialect speakers, amplifiers (e.g., marrah ‘very’) were the most frequent, followed by emphasisers (e.g., waḷḷah ‘truly’) and downtoners (e.g., šwayy ‘a bit’). Within amplifiers, boosters like marrah ‘very’ were more frequent compared to maximisers such as tamāman ‘completely’. The social factors investigated in the variationist analysis are gender, age and education, while the linguistic factors are adjective semantic category, adjective syntactic function, adjective polarity, adjective emotionality, the seriousness of discussion topics and position of intensifier. Amplifiers were found to be highly sensitive to social factors, while downtoners were more conditioned by linguistic factors. Female speakers used amplifiers more frequently than male speakers. The two most common amplifiers, marrah and jiddan, had two different profiles and analysis of their usage in the aggregate data and in the speech of outliers underscored many social and linguistic aspects involved in their usage and change. Further, the booster marrah seems to be an enregistered marker of feminine linguistic style. Overall, this study paves the way for future research on Arabic intensifiers. It offers theoretical and methodological insights for advancing the field of sociolinguistics, especially in relation to the variation of discourse-pragmatic features, the stylistic analysis of individual speakers and the implementation of digital discourse in sociolinguistic enquiries. It is also likely to be significant across various linguistic disciplines, such as language teaching and language acquisition