Quite new methods for a rather old issue : Visualizing the constructional idiosyncrasies of quite and rather in the BNC with multivariate statistics

I investigate the use of two English intensifiers: quite and rather. When quite and rather modify attributive adjectives, they can occur in pre-determiner position, an idiosyncratic behavior that other intensifiers do not show: (1) I know it's a fairly / *fairly a difficult question. (2) That's proved to be a quite / quite a difficult question to answer. (3) That is a rather difficult / rather a difficult question to answer. Allerton (1987) observes that, depending on whether the adjective that quite modifies is scalar or absolutive, some restrictions apply, a sign that pre-determiner position is more than just a matter of style or formality: (4) I mean this is quite a good idea / ??a quite good idea actually. (4') This is ??quite an excellent idea / a quite excellent idea. The question that naturally arises is whether there is any difference in meaning between the pre-determiner and pre-adjectival positions of quite and rather. Another question is whether these two intensifiers are synonyms. Previous works on English intensifiers rely almost exclusively on the concept of gradability to explain the relationship between intensifiers and adjectives (Quirk et al. 1985, Allerton 1987, and Paradis 1997). However, several studies conclude that context dependency is not always decisive to decide how an adverb modifies an adjective (Paradis 1997, Nevalainen & Rissanen 2002, Athanasiadou 2007). Corpus-based approaches address this problem (Altenberg 1991, Kennedy 2003, Lorenz 2002, Simon-Vandenbergen 2008) but run up against methodological issues. Indeed, they tend to use measures such as percentages, counts per n-thousand words, or pointwise MI which are inadequate to reveal two-way interactions between collocants (Altenberg 1991, Paradis, 1997, Kennedy 2003). My working hypothesis is that quite and rather have a semantic component paired with a syntactic component over and above their specification of degree. To test this hypothesis, I propose an original method that combines analytical and multivariate statistics. First, I extract all combinations from the 100M-word British National Corpus (World Edition). Then, I implement a technique known as multiple distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004) to determine which adjectives are most distinctively attracted to each intensifier depending on the syntactic construction. Finally, I use the frequencies of distinctive adjectives as input for correspondence analysis (Benzécri 1984, Greenacre 2007), a multifactorial approach that provides a low-dimensional map of the data by calculating matrices between the rows and the columns of a contingency table using the χ2 test. My results show that: i. adjectives cluster differently depending on (a) the intensifier that modifies them, (b) the syntax of the intensifying construction where they occur; ii. quite constructions and rather constructions cluster differently depending on their syntactic profiles (pre-determiner position vs. pre-adjectival position; intensifier + attributive adjective vs. intensifier + predicative adjective); iii. quite and rather attract semantically distinct adjective classes and are not, as expected, exact synonyms. Allerton, D.J. 1987. English Intensifiers and their idiosyncrasies. In Steele, R. & T. Threadgold (eds), Language Topics: Essays in Honour of Michael Halliday, vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 15-31. Altenberg, B. 1991. Amplifier collocations in spoken English. In S. Johansson, & A. Stenström (eds.), English Computer Corpora: Selected papers and research guide, 127-149. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Athanasiadou, A. 2007. On the subjectivity of intensifiers. Language Sciences 29, 554-565. Benzécri, J-P. 1984. Analyse des Correspondances, Exposé Elémentaire (2nd ed.). Paris: Dunod. Greenacre, M.J. 2007. Correspondence Analysis in Practice (2nd ed.). Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC. Gries, S. Th. & A. Stefanowitsch 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: a corpus-based perspective on 'alternations'. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9, 97-129. Kennedy, G. 2003. Amplifier collocations in the British National Corpus: Implications for English Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly 37, 467-477. Lorenz, G. 2002. Really worthwile or not really significant? A corpus-based approach to the delexicalization and grammaticalization of intensifiers in Modern English. In: Wischer, I., Diewald, G. (Eds), Speech, Place, and Action: Studies in Deixis and Related Topics. New York: Wiley, pp. 143-161. Nevalainen, T., & M. Rissanen 2002. Fairly pretty or pretty fair? On the development and grammaticalization of English downtoners. Language Sciences 24, 359-380. Paradis, C. 1997. Degree Modifiers of Adjectives in Spoken British English. Lund University Press. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., Svartvik, J. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. Simon-Vandenbergen, A.M. 2008. Almost certainly and most definitely: Degree modifiers and epistemic stance. Journal of Pragmatics 40, 1521-1542