Hella MUCH variation: Intensification in Northern California English, as seen through the South Bay

Authors

Clara McMahon, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-11-2024

Volume

6

Issue

1

Abstract

In this paper I present a unified syntactic analysis to account for all of the typical usages of the Northern California lexical item hella. Specifically, I focus on hella’s usage in the South Bay—a subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area which corresponds roughly to Santa Clara County. Contrary to Boboc (2016), who proposes that Bay Area speakers do not allow hella to modify silent elements, I provide evidence that hella is a degree word which can license silent elements for South Bay speakers. Using a silent MANY and a silent MUCH (Kayne 2005), all of hella’s usages are accounted for while maintaining that hella is a single lexical item across all of its usages. Additionally, this paper demonstrates an example of dialectal variation within the state of California.

Recommended Citation

McMahon, Clara. 2024. Hella MUCH variation: Intensification in Northern California English, as seen through the South Bay. Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity 6 (1), 1–17.