(and its back-formation
polite variant, hecka
), like many new words (often called slang
), displays more innovation than it gets credit for. Often, fans of prescriptive grammar
and others without deep understanding of languages believe that because a word is new, used by young speakers, and/or is something that they don't understand because it is not used by their speech community
, that it is meaningless
and/or a "filler word
" (and, in many cases, evidences language degradation
). However, the word hella
has unique meaning and in this way expresses a subtlety of usage
that generally goes unnoticed.
The common interpretation of the word hella
, both by users and non-users of the word, is as an intensifier
, a class of words including very
, and the like. Because of this belief, hella
is often compared to wicked
, a slang
intensifier used in Massachusetts
can certainly be used as an intensifier
, such as in the utterances
1) That movie was hella stupid.
2) She was hella checkin' you out.
can also be used as a quantifier
, a class of words including some
, etc. In this sense, hella
as "a lot", though it is worth noting that it can quantify both mass
and count nouns
, which is unusual. Examples 3-4 illustrate this type of use.
3) We bought hella food for the party.
4) There were hella people at that party.
can be used to affirm truth value
, like the word really
(above I mention that really
is an intensifier, but in this case, and many others, the word functions in different ways in different context
s: in the utterance "She's really smart," really
acts as an intensifier, whereas in the utterance, "She really is smart," it functions to reaffirm the truth value of, "She is smart.") Example 5 illustrates the truth value function of hella
5) She's hella from France.
It's clear that this is a truth value marker rather than an intensifier, because the proposition "she's from France" is not something that be graded
the way that "she is smart" can be; it can only be intensified by having its truth affirmed.
(2000) looked at the word hella
in various environments (though she did not include the truth value function) and provided the following unified analysis
"I hypothesize that HELLA indicates a large proportion of the set
denoted by the constituent
it modifies. This analysis yields an interpretation as an intensifier or quantifier, depending on the denotation
of the set it modifies. Syntactically, HELLA is a specifier
of the Intensifier category, a more generalized intensifier than previously documented in English
It's not clear that this analysis works with the truth value examples, however, as "from France" is not a set of which a portion can be indicated. This analysis would require further work in order to unify all uses of hella
Waskler, Rachelle. "A HELLA New Specifier" (2000) Festschrift
for Jorge Hankamer
, S. Chung, (ed.), http://ling.ucsc.edu/Jorge.