Table 9.

Instances of Intensification Using Very in the Control Subcorpus.

Peripheral, Positive, Negative Uses of Very	Focus	Of tokens	Examples
Peripheral (secondary narratives)		(8)	Very rarely do I listen to it (TV news) She was with him at the very end.
Positive	Patient	8	… very healthy for someone with lung cancer She was very proud of being a cancer survivor.
	Self	8	We get along very well, I am very blessed … At home, I can handle it very well. I just walk away …
	Medical	9	We always have very good access to the care manager … her job. She is very good at it.
	Social	6	He (the priest) is very faithful … The people (at church) are just great, very great.
Subtotal positive			31/74 = 42%
Negative	Patient	19	It was very difficult to understand him. He wasn’t thinking very good thoughts. And that scares me.
	Self	22	I was very upset about that. I am not very good at asking for help. I’ll tell you what it is: lonely, very lonely
	Medical	1	The doctor was actually amazed and shocked and was very disappointed.
	Situation	1	… you have days where everything is just piling up, you know, like we picked a very chaotic day that day.
Subtotal negative			43/74 = 58%
Subtotal positive and negative		74
Total tokens of very		82