Sweet as – The [ADJ + as] intensifier construction in Māori English/Aotearoa English

Abstract

We introduce the Waikato Māori English Conversation (MEC) corpus, which consists of 43 dyadic conversations between 49 young adults who self-recorded informal conversations with close friends, in their own homes, with no topic of conversation specified (83 hours of dialogue; nearly 800,000 words). The resulting materials are colloquial and unstructured, capturing a wider range of pragmatic and stylistic modes than is possible in a standard sociolinguistic interview. Here, we report on one such feature, the [ADJ + as] construction, for example: ‘sorry some of the questions are like awkward as’ and ‘that caused a big as drama eh’. This intensifier construction has been identified as a distinctive New Zealand English (NZE) innovation, yet little has been written about this it. However, the Waikato MEC corpus presents the opportunity to analyse the construction in a more systematic manner and to fill existing gaps in analyses of Māori English grammar.