Extremely interesting, very interesting,

or only quite interesting?

Adverbs and social class
1
Ronald Macaulay
Pitzer College, California
An earlier study, based on interviews with a socially stratied sample showed a
dierence in the use of adverbs, with the middle-class speakers using derived
adverbs in -ly more than twice as frequently as the working-class speakers. An
examination of interactions in peer-group same-sex dyads shows a similar
socially stratied pattern in both adults and adolescents. There are similar
dierences in the use of some other adverbs and certain adjectives. The
consistency of the results suggests that there is a stable dierence in speech
styles between the two social classes and that this dierence reects a dierent
attitude on the part of the speakers to their audience.
KEYWORDS: Social class, discourse analysis, speech style, Scottish
dialect, age dierences
I am glad you like adverbs I adore them; they are the only qualications
I really much respect . . .
Henry James, letter to a young admirer, 1902
INTRODUCTION
Social class gured prominently in early sociolinguistic investigations (Macau-
lay and Trevelyan 1973; Trudgill 1974) but became less central as the focus
moved to ethnicity, networking (Milroy 1980) and gender (Coates 1986). There
continue to be studies of social class dierences (e.g. Foulkes and Docherty
1999) usually with particular attention to the role of social class dierences in
language change. There have, however, been fewer studies of stable social class
dierences. Macaulay (1991) examined a range of features in a small sample of
speakers in the town of Ayr in the west of Scotland. Many of the clearest social
class dierences were in pronunciation and morphology, similar to those found
in other sociolinguistic studies, but there were also dierences in syntax, lexical
choice and discourse features. Some of the latter dierences resembled those
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Journal of Sociolinguistics 6/3, 2002: 398417
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examined by Basil Bernstein in his early attempts to characterize social class
dierences in language (Bernstein 1962).
As a young man working with boys' clubs in the east end of London and later
teaching adolescents at a day college, Bernstein was struck by the dierence
between the boys' verbal skills and their performance skills (Bernstein 1971: 2
5). He later demonstrated this by comparing the results of two polarized groups
on tests of verbal and non-verbal intelligence. He was able to show that the
verbal scores of the working-class boys were depressed in comparison with their
non-verbal scores, while there was no dierence for the middle-class subjects
(Bernstein 1960). Bernstein had some intuitions about the actual linguistic
dierences that he set out in a paper not based on his own research (Bernstein
1959). Among the characteristics of what he was then calling a public language
(used by, among others, `the unskilled and semi-skilled strata') was `rigid and
limited use of adjectives and adverbs' (1971: 42).
2
Bernstein later investigated
this notion empirically in a study based on discussion groups with two middle-
class groups of ve boys and two working class groups of ve boys and one of
four (Bernstein 1962). A sample of 1,800 words was taken from each session
but this number was reduced by the omission of certain forms and the
contribution of two working-class boys who contributed fewer than 90 words
each. The total number of words analyzed was 7,892.
Bernstein identied a category of `uncommon adverbs' by excluding adverbs
of degree and place, just, and really, in addition to a number of items that would
not normally be considered adverbs (e.g. not, how). Bernstein does not give the
actual frequencies but only the results of the statistical analysis: `[a] greater
proportion of the adverbs of the middle class are uncommon and the dierence
is signicant beyond the 0.001 level of condence' (1971: 101). This dierence
in adverb use has similarities to one found in the Ayr study, and I later
examined a corpus of conversations recorded in Glasgow (Stuart-Smith 1999)
where the same social class dierence in the frequency with which the speakers
used adverbs emerged. This paper reports the results from the two studies and
explores possible explanations for this consistent dierence.
THE SAMPLE
In 1978 and 1979 I conducted interviews in Ayr as part of a proposed (but
never completed) comparative study of urban speech in Scotland. From these
interviews I chose twelve speakers, six middle-class and six lower-class, for
detailed analysis (Macaulay 1991). The sample was clearly polarized in social
class terms on grounds of occupation, education and residence. The tapes were
transcribed in their entirety and searched for phonological, morphological,
syntactic, lexical and discourse features (Macaulay 1991). The size of the corpus
is 120,669 words (lower-class speakers 69,711; middle-class speakers 50,898).
The second set of recordings was collected for an investigation of language
variationand change inGlasgow, Scotland (Stuart-Smith1999). The study is one
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of several (Foulkes and Docherty 1999) carried out to discover what changes, if
any, had occurred in British urban speech since the earlier studies of the 1970s
(e.g. Macaulay and Trevelyan 1973; Trudgill 1974). In the summer of 1997, 33
Glaswegians were recorded in same-sex dyadic conversations of approximately
35 minutes long. The speakers were drawn from two areas of the city,
representing broadly urban working-class and suburban middle-class areas.
The sample consists of two age groups: adolescents (1314) and adults (40+),
with equal numbers of males and females.
3
For each session one speaker was
selected and asked to choose someone they would feel comfortable talking to in
the presence of a tape-recorder for about half an hour. The participants were
free to talk about anything they wished. The resulting tapes provide material for
an examination of age, social class and gender dierences in this particular form
of discourse, and are free from any addressee eect (Bell 1984) that might be
caused by an academic interviewer. Although there are more adult speakers in
the Glasgow study the total amount of speech recorded from the adults is less
than in the Ayr study, 84,616 words (working-class speakers 50,307; middle-
class speakers 34,309). The main reason is that the Ayr interviews lasted longer
than half an hour.
Inthe Glasgowsample, unlike the Ayr sample, there were also adolescents aged
1314. They produced considerably less speech overall than the adults, 43,046
words (working-class adolescents 21,093; middle-class adolescents 21,953) and
there were social class and gender dierences in the amount of talk recorded. The
working-class boys produced less speech than the others and the working-class
girls the most, so the adolescent corpus is unbalanced in gender terms but there is
enough speech from all four categories to justify quantitative analysis.
Bernstein emphasized that the kinds of dierences he found between working-
class and middle-class speakers were not absolute but relative: `[t]he dierence on
individual measures was always one of relative frequency' (1971: 13). The key
measure used in the present paper is the frequency of use per one thousand
words. The Ayr and Glasgow samples were transcribed in their entirety, both as
dialogues and with the contribution of each speaker separated. The contributions
of individual speakers were analyzed by means of the WordCruncher concord-
ance programme. The resulting lists were then manually searched for items that
might vary in their distribution. Among these were derived adverbs in -ly.
THE DATA
1. Adverbs in -ly
Adults. Table 1 gives the frequency of adverbs in -ly for the Ayr sample, from
Macaulay (1995: 44), and for the Glasgow adult sample. It can be seen that
while there are minor dierences, the general pattern is remarkably similar in
both, with the middle-class speakers using derived adverbs in -ly more than
twice as frequently as the working-class speakers. This similarity was reassuring
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because I had worried that the social class dierences in the use of derivative
adverbs found in the Ayr study might be an artifact of the interview situation
(Macaulay 1995). The gures in Table 1 cannot be directly compared with
Bernstein's ndings because they include really and degree adverbs, and
Bernstein reports only the proportion of `uncommon adverbs' rather than
frequencies, but the pattern is presumably similar.
Figure 1shows that for the Glasgowadults the individual frequencies reect the
Table 1: Relative frequency of derivative adverbs in -ly in Ayr and Glasgow
Ayr Glasgow
Lower-class Middle-class Working-class Middle-class
# Freq. # Freq. # Freq. # Freq.
Manner 28 0.40 82 1.61 11 0.22 32 0.93
Time/Freq. 41 0.58 70 1.38 19 0.38 33 0.96
Degree 47 0.67 121 2.38 35 0.69 42 1.22
Sentence 76 1.08 174 3.42 92 1.82 197 5.74
really 55 0.79 106 2.08 93 1.85 104 3.03
Totals 247 3.52 553 10.87 250 4.97 408 11.89
Freq. = per 1,000 words
Figure 1: Frequency of use of adverbs in -ly by 18 Glasgow adults (freq. = per
1,000 words)
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general pattern with two outliers, one middle-class woman with a frequency of
6.5 and one working-class woman with a frequency of 12.2. Figure 1 also shows
that it is the middle-class men who are the most frequent users of these adverbs.
At this point it may be helpful to point out that while the dierences in adverb
use are not salient and are not indexical of social class membership in
Silverstein's (1996) sense, there are many obvious dierences in pronunciation
and morphology that distinguish the two groups. The dierences between the
two groups in Ayr are summarized in Macaulay (1991: 257). The dierences in
pronunciation in Glasgow are presented in Stuart-Smith (1999). Nobody from
Ayr or Glasgow would have the slightest diculty in assigning any of the
speakers to one social class or the other on the basis of a short extract from the
tapes. The two groups are clearly polarized within the local speech community.
Macaulay (1995) also examined the use of adjectives by the two groups of
speakers in Ayr and found that the middle-class speakers used adjectives with a
frequency of 22.41 per thousand in contrast to the lower-class speakers with a
frequency of 11.74. The gures for the Glasgow sample show the middle-class
speakers with a frequency of 34.16 and the working-class speakers with a
frequency of 24.74. Once again, the pattern is repeated, though the distance
between the groups is less in Glasgow.
Adolescents. What about the adolescents in Glasgow? The overall frequency of
derivative adverbs in -ly for the Glasgow adolescents is given in Table 2.
Although the overall frequency of use is lower than in the adult sessions the
pattern of social class dierences is similar and the dierence is still substantial.
The individual gures are shown in Figure 2. Here the outliers are two middle-
class boys who use very few adverbs in -ly and one working-class boy who uses
these adverbs with a frequency of 8.2. It is the other two middle-class boys that
use these adverbs most frequently, like the middle-class men.
Given the overall higher frequency with which these adverbs are used in the
middle-class sessions, it is not surprising that the variety of adverbs is greater. In
Table 2: Frequency of adverbs in -ly in Glasgow adolescent
conversations, by gender and social class
N Freq.
Middle-class girls 84 8.1
Middle-class boys 101 8.8
Working-class girls 50 3.7
Working-class boys 29 3.9
MC adolescents 185 8.4
WC adolescents 79 3.9
Freq. = per 1,000 words
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the middle-class adult conversations there are 74 dierent adverbs in -ly used;
in the working-class conversations, 37 dierent adverbs are used. Of the total,
22 adverbs are used by both groups, the most frequent being really (MC 3.03/
WC 1.85) and actually (MC 2.8/WC 0.74). In the case of the adolescents, the
middle-class speakers use 32 dierent adverbs in -ly, and the working-class 21,
with 15 used by both. As with the adults, the most frequent are really (MC
3.14/WC 0.85) and actually (MC 0.73/WC 0.57). However, the list of adverbs
unique to either social class group does not suggest that the source of the
dierence lies in education. It is unlikely that educational dierences account
for the failure of working-class speakers to use adverbs such as badly, clearly,
fairly, happily, etc. or their use of such adverbs as automatically, basically,
entirely, and literally that do not occur in the middle-class conversations. Nor
is there any indication that the working-class speakers are using uninected
forms (suxless adjectives, zero forms) instead of inected adverbs. These
forms are more common in American English (Opdahl 2000) and they have
also been found to occur fairly frequently in northern British English
(Tagliamonte and Ito 2001). In both the Ayr and the Glasgow recordings
uninected forms were too rare to aect the results.
As regards the use of adjectives, the social class dierence found among the
adults is repeated in the adolescent conversations. The middle-class adolescents
use adjectives with a frequency of 29.79 per thousand words and for the
working-class adolescents the frequency is 21.86. The social class dierences
Figure 2: Frequency of use of adverbs in -ly by 16 Glasgow adolescents (freq.
= per 1,000 words)
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that were found in the Ayr interviews have thus been repeated in the Glasgow
conversations, among both adults and adolescents.
2. Other adverbs
It is not only derived adverbs that show this marked social class dierence. In
the Ayr interviews the middle-class speakers used very with a frequency of 3.03
per thousand words compared with a frequency of only 0.82 in the lower-class
interviews. A similar pattern is found in the Glasgow conversations (see
Figure 3). It can be seen from Figure 3 that very is almost categorically a
middle-class word. Eleven (61%) of the 18 working-class speakers do not use it
even once in their conversations. The Glasgow adolescents have two additional
intensiers that are not found in the adult sessions, pure and dead. The
frequencies are shown in Figure 4.
Examples of the use of pure and dead can be seen in 1:
1. a. this is pure embarrassing
b. this is dead embarrassing
c. it's pure funny but
d. I'd look dead funny without a fringe wouldn't I?
e. and I was like really close to Chi
f. I was standing pure close to him
g. she used to be dead fat
h. she's dead skinny now
Examples 1e and 1f show that pure is most likely an alternative to really but
many of the examples of dead are like those in 1g and 1h modifying an adjective
Figure 3: Frequency of use of very and quite by Glasgow adults and adolescents
(freq. = per 1,000 words)
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and could be an alternative to very. It can be seen from Figure 4 that while both
boys and girls use these forms, girls use themthree times as frequently. The overall
social class dierence for the two intensiers is very slight (MC 5.4/WC 6.4).
Another adverb whose use varies socially is quite. In the Ayr interviews, the
middle-class speakers also used quite more frequently (2.49 per 1,000 words)
compared with the lower-class speakers (1.00 per 1,000 words). A similar
pattern can be seen in the Glasgow conversations, as shown in Figure 3, which
shows that quite is predominantly a middle-class item in both age-groups.
The use of quite can either be emphatic (what Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and
Svartvik 1985: 590 call `maximizers'), as in the examples in 2, or a hedge (what
Quirk et al. 1985: 577578 call `downtoners'), as in the examples in 3. All the
examples in 2 and 3 are from middle-class conversations:
2. a. but I think clothes-wise we're quite dierent
b. and I was quite proud because I was still thirty nine
c. I do it quite quickly
I can do it in about fteen seconds
d. San Francisco's actually quite chilly so
e. it's quite quite quite quite dierent
3. a. it is actually quite nice
b. I mean Alison's still quite sort of young
c. the actual wee beach is is quite nice because it's sort of rough sand
d. it's quite pleasant it's it's sand-dunish and em
e. but it's it's er quite interesting to nd how dierent people do speak
Figure 4: Frequency of use of pure and dead by Glasgow adolescents (freq. =
per 1,000 words)
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Deciding between these two functions is sometimes dicult so any gures reect
an interpretative decision. The middle-class speakers appear to use quite more
frequently in its emphatic function (67%) than in its hedging function (33%).
For the working-class speakers the dierence is less: 56 percent emphatic,
44 percent hedging. However, the middle-class speakers use quite with an
overall frequency of 3.64 per thousand words compared with the working-class
frequency of 1.19. The frequency with which the middle-class speakers use quite
in its emphatic function is 2.42 per thousand words compared with the
working-class frequency of 0.66. In the hedging function the frequencies are:
middle-class 1.2, working-class 0.52. The middle-class thus use quite twice as
often as the working-class speakers in a hedging function and almost four times
as often in the emphatic function.
The nal adverb to be examined is just. In the Ayr interviews the dierence in
the frequencies of just was minimal (MC 5.01/WC 4.84). The frequencies for the
Glasgow speakers are shown in Figure 5. It can be seen that the social class
dierences are slight. This is the only example of a very common adverb that the
working-class adults use more frequently (6.72 per 1,000 words) than the
middle-class adults (5.28). There are, however, also social class dierences in
the use of just. While the working-class adults use just slightly more frequently
(6.18 per 1,000 words) than the middle-class adults (5.22 per 1,000 words),
they do not use just in exactly the same way.
In Ayr, following the analysis presented in Lee (1987), I separated the uses of
just into four categories. The rst is with reference to time, usually the
Figure 5: Frequency of use of just by Glasgow adults and adolescents (freq. =
per 1,000 words)
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immediate past, as in examples 1a and 1b. The second use is as an intensier
with the general sense of `exactly,' as in examples 2a and 2b. The third use is in
the sense of `only,' as in examples 3a and 3b. Finally, there is the sense of
`simply,' as shown in examples 4a and 4b:
4. (the a examples are middle-class, b examples working-class)
1a. I've just realised something (speaker 10R)
1b. that's it just opened up again (13R)
2a. yes that's just what I was thinking (12L)
2b. well just as it turns round the bend (15L)
3a. but it's just a baby (12L)
3b. it was just the two of us (14L)
4a. I'll just take everything out of the dining room (10R)
4b. I'll just go alang (13R)
The examples in 4 show that both groups use just in all four senses but they do
not use them equally frequently as shown in Figure 6. The working-class adults
use just more often in the `simply' sense, while the middle-class adults make
more frequent use of the `recency' and `exactly' senses than do the working-
class speakers. The latter middle-class use is most distinctive when employed
emphatically with adjectives and verbs as in 5:
5. a. It's just awful. I mean that's my lot plus another three it's just horrendous you
know absolute madness (10R)
b. and I mean she was just impeccable (16R)
c. and it just poured (16L)
d. oh it's just out of this world (12R)
Figure 6: Social class dierences in the use of just in four senses by Glasgow
adults (% of group usage)
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There is nothing remarkable about this emphatic use but it does not occur in the
working-class sessions. The middle-class speakers also use just with hedges, as
in 6:
6. (Hedges in bold)
a. Truro's really just a sort of market town (10L)
b. to stop and just sort of pitch their camp there for the day (16R)
c. it's really just a sort of buer (10R)
d. it kind of had been programmed to really sort of just keep you in order (12R)
There are not many examples of these uses in the middle-class conversations
but there is none in the working-class conversations.
In the adolescent conversations there are only minor social class dierences,
with the middle-class adolescents using just with a frequency of 8.88 per
thousand words and the working-class adolescents with a frequency of 8.30
per thousand words. The pattern and frequencies are remarkably similar to
those in the adult conversations, showing that unlike very and quite, the
adolescents are using the word in much the same way as the adults. There
are even examples of the emphatic evaluative use (examples 7a and 7b) and of
the use of just with hedges (examples 7c and 7d) that occur only in the
conversations between middle-class adolescents:
7. (Hedges in bold)
a. she's just dead annoying (5L)
b. and I mean that's just stupid (5R)
c. she's just sort of standing in for Mister Weir (3L)
d. and eventually they just sort of ran out (4R)
As with the adults, there are few examples but they occur only in the middle-
class conversations.
DISCUSSION
Since the Ayr interviews and the Glasgow conversations were recorded under
very dierent circumstances, their similarity is striking and raises questions as
to why this situation should arise. However, as Bernstein pointed out, the
diculty is `the problem of inferring from micro counts of specic linguistic
choices to macro characteristics of the speech as a whole' (1971: 13). The
remainder of this paper will be devoted to examining possible explanations for
the social class dierence in the use of inected and other adverbs. It may be
helpful to take as a starting-point three examples of empirical investigation.
Bernstein (1971[1962] ) included adverb use in a list of features that he
identied as characteristic of what he was then calling a restricted code rather
than a public language:
The restriction on the use of adjectives, uncommon adjectives, uncommon adverbs,
the relative simplicity of the verbal form and the low proportion of subordinations
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supports the thesis that the working-class subjects do not explicate intent verbally and
inasmuch as this is so the speech is relatively non-individuated. (Bernstein 1971: 109)
It is not immediatelyobvious what `explicate intent verbally' or `non-individuated'
mean or what role adverbs might play in either. Bernstein (1971) went on to
explain the dierent character of an elaborated code:
Individuated speech presupposes a history of a particular role relationship if it is to be
prepared and delivered appropriately. Inasmuch as dierence is part of the expectation,
there is less reliance or dependency on the listener; or rather this dependency is
reduced by the explication of meaning. (Bernstein 1971: 113)
In other words, `uncommon adverbs' help to make utterances more explicit.
Labov, on the other hand, includes adverbs such as really as signals of intensity:
`Intensity' is dened here as the emotional expression of social orientation
toward the linguistic proposition: the commitment of the self to the
proposition. (Labov 1984: 4344)
Powell (1992), in a historical examination of the development of interpersonal
and metalinguistic senses of stance adverbs, observes that certain adverbs can
`act preemptively to inform and to persuade a hearer of the nature and
importance of the speaker's evaluation' (1992: 76). She regards as interper-
sonal use `any use which the OED denes as emphatic, emphatic use being
preeminently expressive in function' (1992: 83).
What evidence is there in the transcripts to support the hypothesis that the
middle-class speakers use adverbs in -ly: (1) to be more explicit; (2) to express
intensity; or (3) to signal the speaker's evaluation? The Oxford English
Dictionary gives as its denition for the word explicit in relation to knowledge:
`[d]eveloped in detail; hence, clear, denite.' In the Glasgow middle-class
conversations there are examples of derived adverbs that might come under
this heading, as in the examples in 8:
8. a. they're slightly dierent but they're exactly the same colour (10R)
b. and it's immediately at the roadside (16L)
c. it just goes downhill slowly (16L)
d. a wee bit ambiguous here and there but generally okay (11L)
In the examples in 8 the speakers appear to be trying to make the point clearly.
There are, however, similar examples in the working-class sessions, as shown
in 9:
9. a. you would just go along until you get to roughly the rst street (15L)
b. there's really nothing to see in it but it's really quiet (18L)
c. two completely dierent people (13R)
d. he's aboot he's nearly as tall as taller than John must be aboot six two six four
or something (14R)
There are not many examples in either set of conversations and if this is what
Bernstein meant by explicitness, then it does not appear to explain the social
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class dierence in the frequency of derived adverbs. I will return to the
signicance of details later.
As regards intensity, the examples in 10 are taken from the middle-class
interviews in Ayr (Macaulay 1991: 125):
10. a. I found it extraordinarily boring (IM)
b. I got absolutely sick of doing nothing (IM)
c. but this zombie of a mother completely apathetic (WG)
d. a terribly crippled bent old woman (DN)
These examples support Labov's view of these adverbs as expressing intensity.
There are 25 clear examples in the Ayr middle-class interviews but only three in
the working-class interviews. Similar examples can be found in the Glasgow
middle-class conversations:
11. a. and she was apparently absolutely horrendous (10L)
b. who's got absolutely no sense of golng etiquette (11L)
c. whereas the lady describing it thought it was absolutely perfect (11L)
d you're either running around going d absolutely scatty chasing your tail or
(10R)
However, there are similar examples in the working-class sessions, though
fewer, and most of the examples come from one man (18L):
12. a. I was there it was oh it was absolutely brilliant (18L)
b. oh I mean it's amazing it's absolutely fantastic (18L)
c. it seemed to me to be a perfectly good place (18L)
d. everything's all just draining doon like that you know just completely totally
unwinding (13R)
So, there is some support for the view that the use of derived adverbs to express
intensity contributes to the dierence in frequency between the two social
classes.
What about Powell's notion that adverbs are used to express the speaker's
evaluation? The most obvious examples are evidentials, as in examples 13a and
13b but more important are examples such as the hedge in 13c and the
intensier in 13d where the personal attitude is clearly stated:
13. a. but funnily enough I gave out (10L)
b. interestingly enough that one of these programmes on the telly (16R)
c. I thought technically it was brilliant but but it was boring (12L)
d. San Francisco's actually quite chilly . . . it's it's amazingly chilly (16L)
The examples in 13 are from the middle-class sessions. There are a few in the
working-class conversations as well:
14. a. funnily enough we got that one (13R)
b. but hmm unfortunately my trade went (18L)
c. urban decay I mean you can get right into that politically (18R)
d. but as I say I normally drink whisky (13R)
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However, there are few examples in either set of conversations, so the
explanation for the dierence in frequency is unlikely to lie here. However,
some of the adverbs used by the middle-class Glasgow adults suggest an attitude
of condence in making categorical judgments that is less apparent in the
working-class conversations: amazingly, awfully, badly, drastically, enormously,
overly, properly and terribly. Even the other adverbs can have this eect when
combined with adjectives as in the examples in 2, the kind of eect Louw (1993)
describes as `semantic prosody.'
15. L10: mmhm her mother had me in stitches one day
when I bumped into them in town
and I think I'd had a particularly bad day with Kim
and she was telling me all about her Fiona
and what she was like at Kim's age
who and she was apparently absolutely horrendous
In 15 the adverbs emphasize the categorical judgments expressed by the
adjectives.
As was shown earlier the Glasgow middle-class adults use adjectives with a
frequency of 34.16 per thousand words and the working-class adults with a
frequency of 24.74. However, the dierence is greater when evaluative
adjectives (Hunston and Sinclair 2000) are compared. The middle-class
adults use evaluative adjectives with a frequency of 12.88 per thousand
words and the working-class adults with a frequency of 8.67. Moreover,
there is a dierence in the kind of evaluative adjectives used. In the working-
class conversations 52 percent of the adjectives are simple words of approval or
disapproval (e.g. good, bad, nice); in the middle-class conversations only 36
percent of the evaluative adjectives are of this kind. The middle-class adults use
adjectives such as horrendous, horrible, hellish, chauvinistic, unattractive, messy,
impressive, interesting, tremendous, fantastic, substantial and impeccable, but none
of these or similar adjectives is used by the working-class adults.
Of the three possible explanations examined so far, the use of derived adverbs to
showintensity seems to be the most plausible thoughit may be dicult to separate
this from evaluation. Moreover, it is not only derived adverbs that show this
dierence. The dierence in the use of very is hardly one that can be explained in
terms of register or education. It would also appear to be unrelated to explicitness.
It is obviously used to express intensity and emphasis so that it can be used in the
expression of evaluation, as in 16 where its use reects the speaker's assessment:
16. (Middle-class man)
16L: there's a very steep descent to it from the road . . .
it's a very gradual descent to the bay . . .
and it is actually a very nice walk
Biber and Finegan in their cluster analysis of styles of stance found that the
cluster that corresponds to `involved, intense conversational style' (1989: 110)
was characterized by `frequent use of emphatics, hedges, and other general
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evidential markers' (1989: 111). Since the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken
English (Svartvik and Quirk 1980) consists mainly of middle-class speakers and
is the basis for Biber and Finegan's ndings it is not surprising that this
description would also t the middle-class conversations in Glasgow. The
middle-class Glasgow adults in general use more hedges than the working-
class adults. For example, the middle-class speakers use sort of with a frequency
of 1.84 instances per thousand words. The frequency for the working-class
speakers is only 0.54 but even this is misleading because one of the working-
class women uses sort of with a frequency of 2.3 per thousand words; the rest of
the working-class speakers use sort of with a frequency of only 0.23. There is
essentially no dierence in the use of kind of/kinda (MC 0.49 vs. WC 0.45). The
middle-class Glasgow adults are also more likely to use you know in hedges (see
Macaulay 2002). The middle-class Glasgow adults sometimes use derived
adverbs along with hedges, as in the examples in 17:
17. (Adverbs in italics, hedges in bold)
a. Truro's really just a sort of market town (10L)
b. although the carpet was much thinner it was sort of badly tted (10R)
c. and they were trying to sort of actually extend the ladies' rights (11L)
d it kind of had been programmed to really sort of just keep you in order (12L)
Biber and Finegan suggest that the certainty and emphatic forms in their
conversational sample:
seem to reect a sense of heightened emphatic excitement about the interaction, while
the hedges seem to reect a lack of concern with precise details, indicating that the
focus is on involved interaction rather than precise semantic expression. (Biber and
Finegan 1989: 110)
Biber and Finegan were interested in dierent styles employed in dierent
genres, including written materials as well as spoken, so their emphasis is not
on variation within conversational styles and cannot be expected to draw
distinctions of this kind. Nevertheless, their conclusions are consistent with the
middle-class Glasgow conversations. The question then becomes: what is it that
characterizes the working-class speakers? One clue may lie in the phrase `a lack
of concern with precise details' (Biber and Finegan 1989: 110) with reference to
hedges in the London-Lund Corpus materials. It was apparent in the Ayr
interviews that the working-class speakers were concerned about details. The
most extreme example of this was Andrew Sinclair (Macaulay 1985, 1991:
249254):
18. I mean as one of thirteen of a family eh
and I'm one of the oldest ones
well there were four two boys and two girls older than me
Here Sinclair takes care to make it clear just where he came in the birth order.
He also gave many details of work in the coal mines.
The Glasgow working-class speakers also include many details:
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19. (Conversation #13, working-class women)
R13: and eh that's what happened there
everybody was aw watching their bottles going doon you know
doon and doon and doon
the next thing oor table
it was like a half bottle of vodka and a half bottle of whisky and six cans of Pils
and th there was near enough another carry-oot was getting ordered
L13: do you know you know that's what I would have ha had with me
I wouldn't have had the vodka
I'd have had like that my Pils maybe
R13: aye
L13: but I thought `Oh to hell
I'm going I'm going to drink vodka tonight for a change'
R13: aye but see that last one?
the Times were gieing a can of Pils oot free in the Coop at the time
can you mind o that?
L13: oh right
R13: so everybody was aw on Pils
everybody that came in aw had aw these Pils
they must have all been buying the Times
and g giving giving aw these Pi cans of Pils
L13: you were get you were getting you
R13: cause their tables were full of them
Everybody
you could guarantee there was aboot six at each table aw drinking Pils
and aw these cans were up
and a big black bag at the the bottom of the hall aw the cans were getting put
into
cause that's what I was on an aw
and then as I say we ended up going on to Haddows and getting mair
This is a narrative about a night's drinking but nothing much happens in the
story. Yet the details are important: the vodka, the whisky, the cans of Pils
(beer). The evaluation comes in the line `there was near enough another carry-
oot was getting ordered.' This means that despite the amount of drink on the
table they were thinking of getting more from the o-licence (liquor store), and
in the end they did: `we ended up going on to Haddows and getting mair.' It was
clearly a night of prodigious drinking and the way it is communicated is
through the details. There are no summarizing adjectives or adverbs.
In the Ayr interviews, the lower-class speakers made use of several syntactic
constructions that have a highlighting or intensifying eect (Macaulay 1991:
118123). The ve dierent constructions: demonstrative focusing; clefting;
noun phrase preposing; left dislocation; and right dislocation are illustrated in20:
20. (Ayr, lower-class speakers)
a. Demonstrative focusing
i. that's us going for another game (WL)
ii. and that was you shut in the house for a week (EL)
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b. Clefting
i. it's a queer man and wife that doesnae have an argument (EL)
ii. it's them that's running it now (MR)
c. Noun phrase preposing
i. an auld auld man he was you ken (WR)
ii. and one of them he had been out with once or twice (AS)
d. Left dislocation
i. Mr Patterson he was a gentleman (WL)
ii. but my own family they've had a lot of leeway (EL)
e. Right dislocation
i. she was a very quiet woman my mother (WR)
ii. in fact he oered me a job Mr Cunningham (WL)
The lower-class speakers inAyr used these constructions witha frequency of 2.91
per thousand words, in comparison to a frequency of 0.58 in the middle-class
interviews. A similar dierence was found in the Glasgow adult conversations,
withthe working-class speakers using these constructions witha frequency of 2.4
per thousand words and the middle-class speakers 0.23. The actual gures are
shown in Figure 7. It can be seen that with the exception of demonstrative
focusing, the middle-class speakers in both Ayr and Glasgow (columns 1 and 3)
make some use of these constructions but very slight in comparison with the
working-class speakers. This is the reverse of the situation with adverbs.
Figure 7: Social class dierences by Ayr and Glasgow adults in the use of
highlighting constructions (left dislocation, right dislocation, NP-fronting,
it-clefting, demonstrative focusing) (freq. = per 1,000 words)
ADVERBS AND SOCIAL CLASS 415
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CONCLUSION
The examination of the Ayr interviews and the Glasgow conversations reveals a
dierence in discourse style between the two social classes. The middle-class
speakers appear to adopt two complementary strategies. One is to use adverbs
(and adjectives) to make emphatic statements, making quite clear their opinions
and their attitudes. The other is to soften their statements with hedges of
various kinds. Both of these strategies are consistent with Biber and Finegan's
conclusions from the London-Lund Corpus about an `involved, intense con-
versational style' (1989: 110). The working-class speakers, on the other hand,
seem to avoid these strategies and instead depend upon an accumulation of
details and several movement rules to focus attention on certain constituents.
Neither of these styles ts the kind of distinction between an elaborated code and
a restricted code that Bernstein sought to draw from his investigation. Indeed, it
could be argued that the working-class speakers are more explicit than the
middle-class speakers.
In the earlier paper (Macaulay 1995: 5153), I argued that the working-
class use of quoted dialogue allowed the hearer more freedom to interpret the
situation than did the use of evaluative adverbs and adjectives, which impose
the speaker's interpretation on the listener. In the same way, the greater
emphasis on details in the Glasgow working-class conversations provides the
hearer with the information necessary to understand the situation. In
contrast, the Glasgow middle-class speakers seem anxious to make sure that
there is no doubt about their attitude or opinion (`very user-friendly really'
L12; `it's actually quite nice for swimming' L16) and to do so they often
employ adverbs.
Given the dierent ways in which the data for the two studies were collected,
the results cannot simply be the eect of the methodology. The consistency of
the social class dierences is remarkable since there is nothing that stands out in
the choice of topics that might aect the use of adverbs (or adjectives). Nor can
the patterns of use be the result of interviewer bias, since there were no
interviewers in the Glasgow sessions. One way of validating results is by testing
again and again, by the same or dierent methods, in similar or dierent
settings, with similar or dierent samples (Campbell and Fiske 1959). Since
quantitative studies of discourse variation are not yet common it would be
unwise to place too much signicance on the results of two small-scale studies,
but the fact that the social class dierences show up so strongly in two quite
dierent kinds of sample is some validation for the claim that something
fundamental in the speech style used by the two social class groups in western
Scotland governs their use of adverbs.
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NOTES
1. In the years in which I have been presenting papers on this topic I have received
comments from a wide variety of scholars, including anonymous reviewers and the
editors of this journal. To all of them I express my gratitude and my apologies for
perhaps not beneting as much as I should have done from their help.
2. All page references are to the collected versions in Bernstein 1971.
3. For technical reasons three sessions were recorded with working-class women; one
speaker was recorded twice with dierent interlocutors. As a result the number of
participants in each social class/age/gender category is not totally consistent but
since the results are presented in terms of frequencies, the dierence in absolute
numbers need not materially aect any conclusions.
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Address correspondence to:
Ronald Macaulay
Pitzer College
Claremont
California 917116101
U.S.A.
ronald_macaulay@pitzer.edu.