摘要：This study aims to identify the intensifiers used in Ammani Arabic (henceforth AA) and to explore whether or not their use is socially constrained by age, gender, and education. Furthermore, the study attempts to find whether the use of intensifiers throughout this dialect is internally constrained through the examination of the effects of a set of linguistic factors (i.e., the semantic class of adjectives, the function of adjectives [attributive vs. predicative], the position of intensifiers (after the adjective or before it), the polarity of adjectives, and emotionality of adjectives) on the distribution of the intensifiers under investigation. To this end, the study draws on the variationist approach proposed by Labov (1972) as a theoretical construct which focuses on sociolinguistic variations in dialects and investigates how variations can be structured. The corpus is based on just over 15 h of digitized recordings obtained from 32 speakers stratified by age, gender, and education. Then, all tokens including the intensifier (ʔikθi:r) and its variants [ʔikθi::r], [ʔikθi:r ʔikθi:r], and [dʒidan] are extracted and coded. The coded data are afterwards analysed using Goldvarb X, so as to obtain the distribution of the variants, their frequencies and significance regarding their variable use. The results show that the most used intensifier among AA speakers is the intensifier [ʔikθi:r], the social factors (age, gender, and education) have no significant effect on the use of intensifiers in AA, and the intensifier [ʔikθi:r] is found to significantly correlate with the semantic class of adjectives of ‘human propensity’ and to occur more often predicatively in the sentence.
