Episode 52: Linguistic Subjectification (Very, Really, Literally, etc.)

Subjectification is a unique linguistic process by which a word evolves to reflect the subjective viewpoint of the speaker using it. For example, the word 'very' used to mean 'true,' but over time, it lost its objectivity and merely became a way of emphasizing subjectivity. In this episode, we explore this process in a broad sense and look at a few more examples.

Further reading:

https://web.stanford.edu/~traugott/resources/TraugottDavidseIntersbfn.pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1028.5275&rep=rep1&type=pdf