Acknowledgements
Intensification and degree phenomena have increasingly attracted attention in research on the sociopragmatics of English usage, present and past. Our book turns to the sociopragmatics of intensifiers in Late Modern English, zooming in on usage in a setting of sociohistorical and judicial importance, the Old Bailey courtroom over a period of 200 years, from the early 1700s to the early 1900s. Some of our speakers in the courtroom were seeking justice, while others were defending their lives against accusations, true or false. There were also witnesses giving testimony and answering questions posed by the judges or other legal professionals. For all these speakers, intensifiers were an important linguistic device that helped them to make themselves heard, whether in the most convincing terms possible or in hedged messages that did not provide more precise information to the court than circumstances warranted. The records of these courtroom sessions have been the source of our intensifier data, which we have explored over the course of our book project. Over the years, this has been an exciting journey, full of discoveries and new things to learn.
It goes without saying that during the course of our journey we have incurred debts of gratitude to many colleagues in the field, conference participants, and departmental and library staff. During the early stages and while shaping our project we profited from valuable discussions with Ursula Lenker. We are indebted to Magnus Huber and Magnus Nissel, who helped us to navigate the amazing world of the Old Bailey Corpus files, and to Lukas Sönning, Inger Persson, Fabian Söderdahl, and Kristin Eklöf, who helped us to grasp how to make our way through the data and statistical analyses.
We are also very grateful for the highly helpful reader comments on our draft chapters, which we received from Birte Bös, Laurel Brinton, Robert Fuchs, Victorina González-Díaz, Magnus Huber, Belén Méndez-Naya, María José López-Couso, Matti Peikola, Sali Tagliamonte, Irma Taavitsainen, and Turo Vartiainen. Our audiences at a number of national and international conferences also gave us valuable feedback on our presentations on the topics related to the contents of our book; these conferences included the 37th ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English) conference in Hong Kong (2016), the Sixth Late Modern English Conference in Uppsala (2017), the 39th ICAME conference at Tampere (2018), and the 12th Studies in the History of the English Language (SHEL) conference in Seattle (2022).
We also extend our warmest thanks to Carolina Billio Gräber, Elena Mayer, and Lena Scharrer for their help in our work on the material. Similarly, our work would not have been possible without the assistance provided by the administrative staff at our departments at the University of Augsburg, Mid Sweden University, and Uppsala University. We are also indebted to Dr Donald MacQueen for his insightful language-checking.
We gratefully acknowledge the research grant we received from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation) in 2016–19, which enabled us to focus on data collection and analyses. We also thank Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskaps-Samfundet i Uppsala (the Royal Society of Humanities at Uppsala) for funding our language-checking round.
Our deep and heartfelt thanks must go Helen Barton and Isabel Collins at Cambridge University Press for their professional guidance as well as patience and understanding.
