The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

178 Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad
Table 9.1 Distribution of most common downtoners (immediately preceding
adjectives) across two registers
Conversation (AmE)
Academic prose
Pretty ******** .
Relatively . ****
Rather . **
Fairly . **
Slightly . **
Almost . *
Somewhat . *
Nearly . .
Notes: Frequencies are based on analysis of texts from the Longman Spoken and Written English
Corpus: c.2.5 million words from American English conversation and c.5 million words from
academic prose. See Biber et al. (1999: ch. 1) for a complete description of the corpus.
Each * represents 50 occurrences per million words; . represents less than 20 occurrences
per million words.
Source: Adapted from Biber et al. 1999: table 7.13
to two registers defined in relatively general terms: conversation (American English
only) and academic prose. As displayed in table 9.1, in conversation, the downtoner
pretty is very common, while all other downtoners are quite rare. 1 In contrast, academic
prose uses a wider range of common downtoners, although none of them is
extremely frequent.
Further analysis shows that downtoners are also used for different purposes in
conversation and academic prose. For example, the downtoner pretty in conversation
often occurs as a modifier of evaluative adjectives, as in pretty good, pretty bad, pretty
cool, pretty easy, pretty sure. Typical examples include:
I’m pretty good at driving in the snow in my car.
That looks pretty bad.
That’s a pretty cool last name, huh?
Is it a system that would be pretty easy to learn?
In contrast, downtoners in academic prose occur with a much wider range of
descriptive adjectives. For example, the downtoner fairly occurs repeatedly with
adjectives such as resistant, consistent, constant, simple, obvious, common, recent, and
direct. Many of the downtoner + adjective collocations in academic prose have to
do with marking the extent of comparison between two items (e.g. slightly smaller,
somewhat lower). The downtoner relatively always has an implied comparison, as in
relatively simple, relatively stable, relatively unimportant. In addition, several downtoners
in academic prose commonly occur modifying the adjective different, specifying a