Emphasizers in spoken and written academic discourse: the case of ‘really’

The role played by mitigation in academic discourse has been the subject of intense scholarly interest over the last two decades, but interest in the role played by intensifying textual elements expressing evaluation and stance – emphasizers – is a more recent turn. This paper presents a preliminary attempt at capturing the uses of the adverb 'really' across spoken and written academic registers. The adverb 'really' is examined with an eye to how its frequencies, meanings and uses vary across spoken and written academic discourse. The findings are interpreted in terms of variation across genres and disciplines. A quantitative analysis of this adverb reveals significant distributional trends across both academic genres and disciplines, and a qualitative analysis confirms that these trends are motivated by genre-specific purposes and disciplinary-specific practices, respectively.