A Corpus-Based Investigation of Absolutely and Related Phenomena in Spoken American English

Abstract

This paper investigates the adverb absolutely in discourse, focusing particularly on the independent use without a modified syntactic head. While previous studies have described its uses extensively, few have explicated the connection between the dependent and the independent uses. This study links the behavior of freestanding absolutely to its collocation patterns in the dependent use, where absolutely occurs strongly with a positive collocate, and frequently an affirmative token. The freestanding form is also characterized as a turn initiator that is used to respond to a prior speaker, a discourse move that prefers agreements. Syntactic reduction and independence as realized in freestanding absolutely are treated here as an instance of Emergent Grammar. The broad implications of this study include ways to understand the impact of language use on language structure, to approach grouping synonymous lexical items, and to analyze the collocation of items without surface collocates.