Unicorn-fart-glitter-sticker-donut-awesome! Intensification in German digital youth language

References –

  • Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2007. ‘Neue Medien–Neue Schriftlichkeit’, Mitteilungen Des Deutschen Germanistenverbandes, 1.7: 72–97

  • Attridge, Derek. 1994. ‘The Movement of Meaning : Phrasing and Repetition in English Poetry’, SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature: 61–83. https://doi.org/10.5169/SEALS-99899

  • Cosentino, Gianluca. 2017. ‘Stress and Tones as Intensifying Operators in German’, in Exploring Intensification: Synchronic, Diachronic and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, Studies in Language Companion Series, ed. by Maria Napoli and Miriam Ravetto (John Benjamins Publishing Company), pp. 193–206. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.189.10cos

  • Cotgrove, Louis Alexander. 2023. ‘New Opportunities for Researching Digital Youth Language: The NottDeuYTSch Corpus’, in Neue Entwicklungen in Der Korpuslandschaft Der Germanistik, ed. by Marc Kupietz and Thomas Schmidt (Tübingen: Narr)

  • Kirschbaum, Ilja. 2002. ‘Schrecklich nett und voll verrückt: Muster der Adjektiv-Intensivierung im Deutschen’ (Düsseldorf: Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

  • Scheffler, Tatjana, Michael Richter, and Roeland Van Hout. 2023. ‘Tracing and Classifying German Intensifiers via Information Theory’, Language Sciences, 96: 101535. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2022.101535

  • Tagliamonte, S. A., and D. Denis. 2008. ‘LINGUISTIC RUIN? LOL! INSTANT MESSAGING AND TEEN LANGUAGE’, American Speech, 83.1: 3–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2008-001

 Abstract –

This paper examines the creative ways in which young people use intensification in German digitally mediated communication (DMC). Both DMC and youth language variants are known for their use of intensifiers and non-standard language structures (Tagliamonte & Denis 2008), therefore an examination of data within this nexus can reveal emergent approaches and developments that have not been covered by previous research on the topic.

Traditional lexicogrammatical linguistics has focused mainly on two grammatical aspects: syntactic intensification, i.e. the use of particles and other lexical items, and morphological intensification, i.e. the use of compounding (Kirschbaum 2002). In the fields of stylistics and literary criticism, however, expressive intensification is often studied as a rhetorical device, i.e. the use of self-repetition of lexical items to create rhythm and movement in the text, to link ideas or to intensify emotions (Attridge 1994). Within the field of media linguistics, particularly those areas focusing on DMC, intensification has often been analysed at a graphemic level, i.e. the repetition of letters or punctuation, the use of capital letters, or a combination of the two (Androutsopoulos 2007). In addition, the field of phonology has long studied the effects of prosody, tone and stress, or the reception of a message (Cosentino 2017). While this last area of intensification is not explored here, as the focus of the paper is on written communication, the relationship between spoken and written language in DMC remains highly relevant for the analysis.

In order to explore the intensification of youth DMC, the paper uses the NottDeuYTSch corpus as a source of linguistic data. The NottDeuYTSch corpus is a balanced and representative collection of 33 million words, collected from over 3 million YouTube comments posted between 2008 and 2018 under German-language videos aimed at teenagers and young people (Cotgrove 2023). Through a mixed-methods analysis of the many examples of intensification contained in the comments in the corpus, the paper proposes three changes:

  1. Existing categories and frameworks used to define intensification (see Scheffler et al. 2023), such as syntactic and morphological, while useful, need to be expanded.
  2. New categories of intensification need to be included to account for the inclusion of multimodal communication and the recontextualisation of existing communicative elements that can be used to intensify.
  3. A more pragmatic definition of intensification needs to be adopted to take account of developments that have occurred as a result of the maturation of DMC as a communicative medium, and to decouple existing definitions of intensification from narrow methodological frameworks.

By unifying previous approaches to intensification from a wide range of academic fields, including linguistics, literary studies and graphic design, this paper demonstrates the creativity, emergent features, and changes in techniques used by young people for intensification in DMC, and presents an updated taxonomy of classification for future analysis of intensification.