I am working on a spoken corpus, called the Student-Transcribed Corpus of Spoken American English. Two undergraduate students, Sadie Barlow and Iris Chen, helped me add new transcripts to the database as part of the Undergraduate Scholars Project. This is the second time the corpus profits from this programme and in total, we added about 10,000 words.

A video of the final presentation is now available. In it, Sadie and Iris discuss variation between the intensifiers 'very' and 'really.' They talk about creating professional transcripts for the spoken corpus. Next, they present evidence for the claim that 'really' is in the process of replacing 'very.' Finally, they suggest that the form 'really' may have originated in youth registers and that there may be a gender difference in its propagation.

You can watch the presentation here or watch it directly below:



I would like to thank Sadie and Iris for their hard work, Hannah Cobb for putting together the Undergraduate Scholars Programme and the attendees of the final celebration day for questions and a fun time.