The chapter introduces the material used for the study, that is, the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC) as well as the Old Bailey Online resource and the Proceedings that the OBC has been based on. The analytical frameworks adopted are also discussed, comprising the corpuslinguistic approach, and the historical sociopragmatics, the language variation and change, and the grammaticalization and pragmatic-semantic change frameworks. Attention is also paid to the late modern courtroom and to the issues of relevance to the study of past spoken interaction based on written records.

The chapter details how the activity type of the courtroom trial and the specific speaker roles, that is, judges, lawyers, defendants, victims, and witnesses, influence the use of intensifiers. Speaker roles, and thus the persuasive aims typical of them, have been found to be more important determiners than gender and social class. Witness and victims are typically found to amplify aspects such as reliability, probability, and blamelessness. Witnesses also amplify the good character of defedants, while the latter themselves maximize their innocence. Lawyers use intensifiers, in particular amplifiers, to elicit the strongest possible answers from witnesses. Lawyers’ most persuasive uses are found in the adversarial legal speeches, where they boost both their own points and their denials of the other side’s arguments.

This chapter provides an inventory of maximizer types and tokens attested in the data. Altogether 23 maximizers, covering both full and zero forms, were included in the study, totalling 9,488 relevant tokens; the four top-frequency items comprise perfectly, too, most and entirely. The diachronic distribution of the top seven maximizers across the period studied is discussed, with comparisons made between usage in the Late Modern English and the modern BNC trials data. The maximizers prove to be the only category of intensifiers increasing across the period studied; boosters and downtoners show declining rates of use. The semantic input domains of the maximizers are discussed, and the targets of intensification and the collocational features in usage patterns presented. Maximizers mainly modify adjectives and less so adverbs and verbs. Within the category of maximized adjectives, the category of Human Propensity dominates; within the maximized category of verbs, the material process types cover most of the uses. Finally, the collocates and semantic prosodies of the top seven maximizers are described, with attention paid to the situation-specific and relatively fixed uses.

In this theoretical background chapter, intensifiers are defined as degree-indicating devices and distinguished from items indicating similar and partly overlapping concepts such as quantification, emphasis, focus, and modality. They are subclassified into the categories of amplifiers (maximizers, boosters) and downtoners (moderators, diminishers, minimizers), with different semantic characteristics and effects. Formally, they are restricted to one-word adverbs, both with and without the -ly suffix. Their typical collocational associations and syntactic behaviour regarding preferred modified targets is dealt with. Their pragmatic distributions in different situational contexts is briefly touched on

This is the main methodology and first-results chapter. It opens with an introduction to the lexeme-based approach used for the investigation, contrasting this to previous, variationist approaches. The chapter proceeds to explain the data retrieval and screening processes and presents an overview of the data, the nearly 65,000 intensifier tokens found in the corpus, across the three main categories (maximizers, boosters, downtoners), and the descriptive results across time for the most frequent items. The word counts of the different sociopragmatic groups of speakers (divided by speakers’ role in the courtroom, gender and social class) are introduced, as well as the diachronic distribution of intensifiers across the genders and social classes. Results are presented within the descriptive statistics framework, but the chapter also briefly introduces the regression model, or the inferential, multivariate statistical method to be used in Chapters 8–11 to disentangle the complex interplay of the sociopragmatic variables of speakers on the use of intensifiers.

The boosters found in the Old Bailey Corpus (1720–1913) are documented in this chapter, with regard to their overall frequency distributions and usage patterns. This includes an overview of the entire inventory of 44 types and 47,613 tokens, which makes it the largest intensifier group in the data. Very is found to dominate the data, followed by far less frequent so and greatly as well as many fairly low-frequency items. Semantically, boosters are subdivided into originally quantitative (denoting amount: greatly, extent: widely) and qualitative types (e.g., denoting truth: very, perception: strikingly or evaluation: badly). Formally, the two most frequent types are unmarked adverbs (very, so); two other boosters prefer the suffixless form to a large extent (great, wide). The targets modified by boosters are mostly adjectives, followed by adverbs, while verbs and prepositional phrases are rare.

This chapter is devoted to downtoners, namely moderators, diminishers and minimizers, with the 19 attested types amounting to 7,874 examples. The dominant type a little constitutes 66 per cent of the occurrences and is followed by hardly with 13 per cent. The distribution of the five most frequent downtoners across the period studied is discussed, and compared to the BNC trials data. The decline in the use of diminisher a little accounts for the overall decline in the use of downtoners in the OBC data. The source terms of downtoners display a more varied spectrum of semantic shades than maximizers and boosters. There is also a greater variety of target categories than attested for boosters and maximizers: the otherwise most frequent targets adjectives are here outranked by prepositional phrases and verbs, with the latter standing out as the specialty of downtoners compared to all other intensifiers. They predominantly modify verbs of the material and mental process types; in the semantic classes of downtoned adjectives, the category of human propensity dominates. As for collocational profiles, for instance a little dominates in collocations with after, before and more.