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Fries's Group D
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Extract
In The structure of English (New York, 1952), Charles C. Fries describes a small group of intensifiers, which he labels Group D and identifies as words that pattern like very. The group is established (92) with the following frame: The (A) concert (1) may (B) not (C) be (2) very (D) good (3) then (4). Substituting in this frame, he gets, as members of Group D, very, quite, really, real, pretty, fairly, rather, awfully, awful, any, too, more, most. We are not told that these are the only members in the corpus examined by Fries; but the implication is that if the group extends beyond this list, it doesn't extend far.
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- Copyright © 1955 by the Linguistic Society of America
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1 Certain other members are added from slightly different frames, and the whole group is subdivided in various ways. These complications do not bear on the point of this paper and are here ignored.
2 Fries does not tell us whether he has given complete lists of the structure words in his material; but he says (104) that ‘the total number of separate items from our materials making up the fifteen groups amounted to only 154.‘ About 125 words are listed in the description of the various groups, and the list for F (prepositions) is manifestly incomplete.
3 In the writer's idiolect. A few other members occurring in special environments are ignored here, e.g. still in He did still better.