a weird ( Language ) taLe : variation and change in the adjectives of strangeness SAli

this article presents a synchronic quantitative study of adjectives in the semantic field of strangeness in a large North American city, toronto, the largest urban center in Canada. the analysis is based on nearly 2,000 adjectives, representing 11 different types, as in She’s really weird and She’s odd. the distribution of these adjectives in apparent time provides startling evidence of change. the adjective strange is quickly moving out of favor, and weird has expanded dramatically, usurping all other forms. Neither linguistic nor social factors are implicated in this change, suggesting that lexical replacement is the prevailing mechanism driving the development. Consideration of the broader context reveals that renewal and recycling of these adjectives is rooted in the history of english and is progressing in parallel at least across british and North American english. the actuation of the shift toward weird may be rooted in developments in literature and mass media, revealing that adjectives are a vibrant area of the grammar that may be used to track cultural influences on linguistic change. in this article, we target a little-studied topic in dialect or variation research, adjectives. this area of grammar is vast in lexical variety, with overlapping meanings and apparently random choices, undoubtedly one of the reasons it has not been the subject of quantitative investigation till now. our first aim is to document how to approach dialect differences, variation, and change in adjectival use systematically. We begin by utilizing a series of computational techniques to explore the data to delimit the investigation. Crucially, we have at our fingertips one of the largest corpora of spoken vernacular North American english, the toronto english Archive (teA). moreover, it is socially stratified and sampled across a wide age range of individuals born from the early to late twentieth century. together, the computational methods and this substantive data set provide key elements for uncovering relevant and timely variation within the adjectives of contemporary (North American) english. Following sociolinguistic methods, we A Weird (Language) Tale 5 delve deeply into a particular semantic field of adjectives—those describing out-of-the-ordinary qualities and things—to uncover patterns and trends in the variation and change of adjectives.