Even though intensifiers have received a good deal of attention over the past few decades, downtoners, comprising diminishers and minimizers, have remained by and large a neglected category (but cf. Brinton, this issue). Among downtoners, the adverb little or a little stands out as the most frequent item. It is multifunctional and serves as a diminishing and minimizing intensifier and also in non-degree uses as a quantifier, frequentative, and durative. Therefore, the present paper is devoted to the structural and functional profile of (a) little in Late Modern English speech-related data. The data source is the socio-pragmatically annotated Old Bailey Corpus (OBC, version 2.0), which allows, among other things, the investigation of the usage of the item among different speaker groups. Our research charts the semantic and formal uses of adverbial little. Downtoner uses outnumber non-degree uses in the data, and diminishing uses are more common than minimizing uses. The formal realization is predominantly a little, with very rare determinerless or modified instances, such as very little. Little modifies a wide range of “targets,” but most frequently adjectives and prepositional phrases, focusing on human states and circumstantial detail. With regard to variation and change, adverbial little declines in use over the 200 years and is used more commonly by speakers from the lower social ranks and by the lay, non-professional participants in the courtroom.

尽管在过去的几十年中增压器已经引起了广泛的关注，但包括减震器和减震器的降噪器在很大程度上仍然被忽略了（但请参阅布林顿，本期）。在唐顿音乐中，副词很少或很少成为最常见的副词。它是多功能的，可以用作减小和最小化的增强器，也可以非量度用作量词，频繁和持续的。因此，本论文致力于（a）小分子的结构和功能概况。在近代英语语音相关数据中。数据源是社交语用注释的Old Bailey语料库（OBC，版本2.0），除其他事项外，它还允许调查不同说话者群体中该物品的使用情况。我们的研究绘制了副词很少的语义和形式用法。Downtoner在数据中使用的数量超过了非学位的使用量，并且减少使用量比减少使用量更为普遍。形式化的实现主要是一点点，很少有无确定性或修改过的实例，例如非常少。很少修改各种各样的“目标”，但最常见的是形容词和介词短语，着眼于人类的状态和环境细节。关于变化和变化，状语在过去的200年中，使用率几乎没有下降，并且由较低社会阶层的演讲者和法庭上的一般非专业参与者使用。