Reconstructing American English in a globally available mass media product: intensifiers in the television series Gilmore Girls

The role played by mass media in the propagation of structured variability is a challenging sociolinguistic issue. Current models propose that the study of possible media effects on (non-)acquired speech patterns must involve comparisons across source speech communities, adopting speech communities and mass media texts. The present study sets out to explore language-specific and sociolinguistic conditioning underlying the use of intensifiers in the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) and compares it to that documented for L1 English vernaculars. This variationist investigation pinpoints similarities in the use of intensifiers by fictional characters and real speakers. These are revealed through the rate of intensification, the most frequent variants and the sociolinguistic profiles of individual variants. The generalized linear mixed-effects ( glme ) model also reveals that language-internal constraints reported for native speaker English are only partially replicated in the speech of Gilmore Girls fictional characters. I discuss the patterns of structured variability that can potentially flow from one speech community to the next via globally available channels.