"sort of" is elitist? (now with data)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 6, 2004, at 7:58 AM, Clai Rice wrote:

> FWIW: I just happen to have some relevant data on hand, the first
> Bush-Kerry
> debate transcript...

intriguing.  but of course what we want is data on the social
concomitants of "kind of/kinda" vs. "sort of/sorta" which we can then
apply to kerry and bush (and anyone else we happen to be interested
in).  and the numbers from the first debate are awfully small.  and
it's not clear which uses of "kind/sort of" we're looking at.  i was
assuming it was the adverbial uses ("I'm kind/sort of tired", "They
just kind/sort of stared at us", etc.), but maybe the determiner uses
are relevant as well ("This is some kind/sort of lie").  (and there are
subtypes of the adverbial and determiner uses, and these might not have
the same social distributions.)

as usual, before we can count things meaningfully, we need to do some
serious linguistic analysis.  otherwise, the project could be like
counting occurrences of "used to" without distinguishing the
quasi-modal verb (with infinitival complement: "I used to be a
mathematician"), the predicate adjectival (with prepositional
complement: "I'm used to criticism"), and the passive verb (with
infinitival adverbial: "This lever is used to open the sluices").

i know there's *some* corpus-based literature on "sort/kind of", but i
haven't had much success winnowing searches down to a manageable
number, so i don't know if there's any research relevant to the issue
we're looking at here.  i've appealed to a colleague who is a
Recognized Authority on *some* uses of "sort/kind of", in the hope that
he will have references close to his fingertips.  i'll report back to
you.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)