Anderson, W. (2006): ‘Absolutely, Totally, Filled to the Brim with the Famous Grouse: Intensifying Adverbs in SCOTS’. English Today, Vol. 22, no. 3. pp. 10-16
The paper begins by introducing the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS), which has been available online since November 2004, and currently contains over two million running words of texts in varieties of Broad Scots and Scottish English, around 20% of which is spoken language (conversations and interviews). Three main factors make SCOTS distinctive: firstly, it targets general users as well as a linguistic audience; secondly, all texts are accompanied by detailed metadata which increases the value of the resource for sociolinguistic researchers and lexicographers; and finally, spoken language texts are provided as orthographic transcriptions aligned with the original source audio or video material, enabling phonetic research as well as lexical searching of both written and spoken texts.
Some features of adverb usage in Scottish English are well known, such as the use of forms identical to the related adjective - e.g. "awfu(l)" rather than "awfully" - to pre-modify adjectives, a feature also found in American English. The paper investigates the function in SCOTS of "awfu(l/ly)" and other similar intensifying adverbs, including the Scots "gey" and "unco", and amplifiers such as "extremely", "totally", "utterly", "entirely", "definitely", "completely", seeking to identify typical patterns of usage, in particular with regard to pragmatic and stylistic force, and to distinguish between written and spoken language.