The fourth dude shift: a rags-to-riches tale continued

Starting from Hill’s (1994) diachronic account which has pointed out three historical great shifts concerning dude usage and a fourth one to come, the present paper aims to verify this fourth shift in the 21st century, which has been left unexplored in terms of research and empirical data. The Corpus of Historical American English will be accessed to verify the historical presence of dude in American English, whereas the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the American Movie Corpus (cf. Forchini forthcoming) will be explored to verify whether the fourth shift has taken place, as expected by Hill (1994). The data triangulated from the three corpora demonstrate that the highest peak of the occurrences and the collocates of dude in American English approximately coincide with Hill’s (1994) shifts; the data from the COCA also confirm the role of the media in the spreading of dude and the exploration of dude in the American Movie Corpus show a rather polyhedric nature of dude. It is concluded that the great expansion of the usage of dude, which has also kept some of its historical meanings and functions, together with its extended polyfunctionality is probably the real novelty of the fourth dude shift characterizing the 21st century.