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‘That's proper cool’

The emerging intensifier proper in British English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

James M. Stratton Open the ORCID record for James M. Stratton [Opens in a new window]
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Extract

Intensifying adverbs are devices which scale a quality up, down, or somewhere between the two (Bolinger 1972: 17). To intensify the adjective cool, speakers of British English have a variety of functionally equivalent intensifiers at their disposal. They can use very, really, so, dead, bloody, right and well, among many others. A seemingly recent arrival to the British intensifier system is proper, as in that was proper cool. Believed to have entered English from the Latin proprius via Norman French (OED, proper), proper now has a variety of denotations in Present Day English. As an adjective, it can denote suitability (e.g., wear the proper equipment), etiquette (e.g., it wouldn't be proper to do that) and worthiness/authenticity (e.g., it's proper street food). As an adverb, proper can function as an adverb of manner (e.g., we like to do things proper in our house), and a marker of degree (e.g., he is proper tall); the degree function applying exclusively to British English. Some examples of proper intensifying adjectives from the present dataset are reported in (1).

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 206 - 213
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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