A Terrific Paper: A Corpus Study of Amelioration and Pejoration in Adjectives Related to Fear

Sammanfattning: The paper looks into the differences and similarities in amelioration and pejoration of adjectives related to the concept of fear. It specifically investigates awesome, awful, and terrific with the aim to find possible patterns and factors which influence change. It uses the English Historical Book Collection and the Corpus of Historical American English for its data to register how often different connotations of the different adjectives are used over time and provides specific examples from the corpora which show a graduate change from negative to positive, suggesting that amelioration and pejoration are built up out of different types of meaning change such as metaphorical change or broadening. Other findings include the presence of a similar rise in neutral connotations in both awesome and terrific with a similar occurrence in awful though awful is currently rarely used with a positive connotation. Different reasons are suggested for this, including the relation to the concept of fear which could play a part as the sense of fear seems to be present for this change in awesome and terrific but not for awful. Other results show the decline in positive connotation for awful after the seventeenth century as the denotation connected to this also becomes obsolete. Possible causes include socio-cultural change.