论文总字数：30976字

摘 要

本文利用英语国家语料库和中国学生口语语料库对中国英语学习者的增强词的使用情况进行调查研究，并借助搜索软件AntConc进行数据分析。研究发现中国英语学习者对该类词既有使用过多又有使用过少的现象。经过研究,他们过多使用的增强语,主要集中在more, very, much和too四个词上。母语负迁移和英语习得时间是导致过多使用增强词的原因。当然，中国学习者过少使用某些增强词，例如completely, considerably, entirely, 和absolutely。这是因为他们输出性词汇缺乏，并且这些单词发音困难，所以中国学习者在口语交流中很少使用这些词。

关键词：增强词；过多使用；过少使用；口语

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 The Definition of Amplifiers 2

2.2 The Researches on the Use of Amplifiers 3

3. Research Design 5

3.1 The Research Questions 5

3.2 The Research Methods 5

4. Results and Analysis 6

4.1 The Amplifiers in BNC and SECCL 6

4.2 The Analysis of the Overuse of Amplifiers 9

4.3 The Analysis of the Underuse of Amplifiers 10

5. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

In daily communication, amplifiers are used to suggest the reader what emotion he should feel. Amplifier is a means to strength semantic degree of a sentence. By naming an emotion within the predicate, the writer compels the reader to consider this emotion and hence he begins to feel it. Besides, people can show their attitudes including pride, deep impressions, persuasion and abuse by using these kinds of words. Moreover, using amplifiers efficiently can show a high level of English ability. The accuracy of expressing English is affected by overusing or misusing intensifiers. And by using amplifiers, the writer can express different degree of commitment. For instance, “a very lovely cat” as compared to “a lovely cat”, the former phrase has a higher effect than the latter one. “Very” is an amplifier which reveals the speaker’s happy feeling about the cat. This paper focuses on the use of amplifiers. Amplifiers are used to stress speakers’ tones. It is frequent for Chinese learners of English to use amplifiers to express their feelings. Therefore, it is significant to do a lot of researches on the use of amplifiers which can give many useful suggestions to Chinese learners.

The learners’ corpus is expected to produce much authentic data which can reflect the learners’ real oral language ability when using these amplifiers in their communication. With the help of search software Antconc, this paper can get clear and accurate data. Further analysis and the tentative explanations will be made. And the research findings are expected to guide the English teaching and learning in China.

2. Literature Review

In this part, in order to have a better understanding of amplifiers, the definitions and classifications of this term are presented. More emphasis is laid on the frequency of amplifiers and the motivation for choosing this kind of word as the research topic. Last but not least, some major corpus-based researches concerning amplifiers will be examined to set up the link to the current research.

2.1 The Definition of Amplifiers

For nearly a century, especially in recent decades, amplifiers have attracted lots of interests of many researchers. In Quirk’s book (Quirk et al, 1985:575), amplifiers generally refer to a particular class of adverbs or adverb phrases, and such words or phrases have the role to strengthen some sentence parts. Amplifiers are used to express a high degree of intensity, such as “very”, “very much” “fully”, “completely”, “quite”, and “absolutely”. Characteristically, English draws amplifiers from a class of words called degree modifiers, words that quantify the idea they modify. More specifically, they derive from a group of words called adverbs of degree, also known as degree adverbs. Technically, amplifiers roughly qualify a point on the affective semantic property, which is gradable. Huddleston (Huddleston, 2002:89) argues that amplifier is not recognized as a primary grammatical or lexical category. Amplifier is a category with grammatical properties, but insufficiently defined unless we also describe its functional significance.

According to Quirk (Quirk et al, 1985:579), the amplifiers are broadly concerned with the semantic category of degree. And Quirk points that amplifiers belong to intensifiers. It should be noted that the term “intensifier’ does not refer only to the meaning whereby an increase in intensification is expressed. Rather, an intensifier indicates a point on an abstractly conceived intensity scale; and the point indicated may be relatively low or relatively high. The scale is seen as applying to a predicate or to some part of a predicate, such as the predication, the verb phrase, or even an item within the verb phrase. The verbs in question are largely expressive of attitudes. Quirk (Quirk et al, 1985:581) describe that amplifiers are one of the major subcategories of intensifiers, and that most amplifiers are adverbs, but sometimes they can be noun phrases or preposition phrases.

It is useful to distinguish two subsets of amplifiers. According to Quirk (Quirk et al, 1985:589), amplifiers can be subdivided into “maximizers” and “boosters”.

Amplifiers are divided into Maximizers (e.g. totally, absolutely, completely, etc), which can donate an absolute degree of intensity and then occupy the upper extreme upper end of the degree scale and boosters (e.g. extremely, very, so, etc), which convey a high degree, a high point on the scale but without reaching the extreme end of the scale.

Similar to Quirk, some dictionaries also define amplifiers as an adverbial class. Collins Cobuild Dictionary, for instance, defines amplifiers as words such as “very” or “extremely”, which can be used “in front of an adjectives or adverb in order to make its meaning stronger”, while the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines them as words which “add stronger feeling to the meaning of an adjectives, verb, or adverb”. Yet, the definitions of amplifiers given by these dictionaries seem to mean “boosters” in Quirk’s sense.

2.2 The Researches on the Use of Amplifiers

Quite a lot of surveys have been done in recent years on the use of amplifiers home and abroad, and studies based on learner corpora to describe and analyze this kind of words have been making great progress. Since the 1990 s, researches that based on the corpus-based study on amplifiers have been carried out step by step.

In foreign countries, many researches have been done based on learner corpora. Biber (Biber, 2000:79) sums that the three words, ‘very’ ,‘so’ and ‘too’ are the most frequently used in native English speaker’s spoken language. Using French learners as the target object of a study, Granger (Granger 1998:132) demands that amplifiers “completely” and “totally” are overused while “highly” is underused. Based on the data of BNC, Kennedy (Kennedy, 2003:467) systematically investigates the collocations of 24 amplifiers and adjectives and participles. His research shows that “fully”, “perfectly”, “dead”, “highly”, “very much”, “great1y”and “considerably” tend to collocate with the words with positive prosody; “total1y”, “utterly”, “extremely”, “badly”, “heavily” and “severely” tend to collocate with the words with negative prosody; “completely”, “entirely”, “absolutely”, “very”, “particularly”, “really”, “clearly”, “deeply”, “terribly”, “enormously” and “incredibly” can collocate with the words with either positive or negative prosody. Altenberg (Altenberg, 1991:127) does a study based on the data of London Lund Corpus of Spoken English and found that “very”, “so”, “very much”, “terribly”, “jolly”, “extremely” are very commonly used by native speakers.

There are also lots of researches on the use of amplifiers that have been done by Chinese scholars. Ding and He (Ding Rongrong amp; He Fusheng, 2006:32) end the study with the conclusion that Chinese EFL learners overuse “very” in their oral production mainly because of negative transfer of their mother tongue and their limited English proficiency, by investigating non-English majors graduate students spoken corpus. With the comparison of compositions written by Chinese learners in CET 4/6 and by native speakers, Qi (Qi Jianxiao, 2006:78) says that on the whole, amplifiers are overused by Chinese learners. The results conducted by Huang"s investigation (Huang Ruihong, 2007:57) show that the semantic prosody as revealed in learner corpus is generally in accordance with that of native speakers. Wang and Chen (Wang Haihua amp; Chen Guohua, 2007:53) examine the development of amplifier collocations characteristics and declaims that the higher English level Chinese learners have, the more quantities of maximizers they may perform and the learners at high school significantly overuse the three “universal amplifiers” i.e. “so”, “very” and “very much”. As far as the accuracy of using tokens and types in the collocations of boosters, the major differences exist between high school students and college non-English majors, and between college non-English majors and college English majors. However, the type, frequency and the range of the collocation of amplifiers vary with learners" language proficiency. What’s more, in the Chen and Ma’s paper (Chenyin amp; Ma Wulin, 2012:48), they point that Chinese learners differ significantly from natives in using “very much” in terms of its frequency, register tendency, colligation type，modifying position and semantic prosody. The use of amplifiers deviates far from the target language，which reveals that Chinese learners do not have a comprehensive mastery of the native usage of “very much”. Chen and Ma require that “very” is overused by Chinese learners of English，while other amplifiers are underused and frequently substituted by “very”．

The above researches are of great importance in revealing and describing the characteristics of learners" amplifiers development, perfecting the syllabus design, and improving English vocabulary teaching skills. However, these researches pay much attention to non-English majors to investigate the use of amplifiers. This thesis will focus on English majors in China to study the use of amplifiers with the help of Antconc. And this paper will focus on Chinese learners’ spoken language to investigate the use of amplifiers in their oral text. Furthermore, this paper attempts to compare the frequencies of amplifiers in BNC and SECCL to explore whether English majors overuse amplifiers or not.

3. Research Design

The current research contrasts two corpora. SECCL is used as the observed corpus and the British National Corpus (BNC) will be used as the contrasted corpus.

3.1 The Research Questions

This paper is a corpus-based study of amplifiers between native speakers and Chinese learners. It aims to give a general picture of the use of amplifiers in Chinese learners’ English speaking. The research questions can be stated as the following:

(1) What is the current situation of amplifiers performed by Chinese learners?

(2) Do Chinese students overuse or underuse the amplifiers in frequency comparing to the native speakers?

3.2 The Research Methods

The learner corpus this paper employed is the 2003-2006 TEM-4 oral texts of college students, which is a part of SECCL. SECCL is a corpus of oral texts which is collected by Wen (Wen et al, 2005:425). Data self in the 2003-2006 TEM-4 oral texts of college students stand for the students’ real performance. The corpus is real, representative and with authority. The research can provide English majors with lots of help in speech. On the purpose of making comparisons, it is necessary to have a native speaker control corpus. BNC is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, and designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century.

For the sake of making comparisons, the standard frequency will be used throughout the whole paper. Besides presenting facts, this paper has the aim to explain, analyze and interpret these facts, and usually, to argue for a certain point.

There are twenty amplifiers involved in this research. The selected amplifiers are “more”, “very”, “too”, “quite”, “much”, “far”, “highly”, “fully”, “completely”, “entirely”, “extremely,” “absolutely”, “totally”, “strongly”, “badly”, “deeply”, “greatly”, “altogether”, “considerably” and “thoroughly”. These words are all selected from British national corpus which is the most frequently used according to Leech (Leech, 2001:167).

This thesis makes use of the corpus search software AntConc which can provide us with some accurate data. That is, AntConc is performed to sum up the frequency of each selected amplifier in both two professional corpora.

4. Results and Analysis

4.1 The Amplifiers in BNC and SECCL

Using amplifiers in daily communication process can influence the listeners’ or readers’ reception of the message. In order to investigate whether the Chinese learners use these amplifiers to the same degree as the native speakers in their English speaking, here is the overall frequency and standard frequency of amplifiers in both of the corpora.

This table is a collection of the frequency and standard frequency of twenty amplifiers in BNC and SECCL. All data are calculated with the reference of a formula: standard= (the frequency of an amplifier/total words in one corpus) *100000. According to the table 1, it is convenient to analyze the frequency distribution of these twenty amplifiers in BNC and SECCL.

Table 1: Frequency and standard frequency (in every 100000 words) of amplifiers in BNC and SECCL

In the Table 1, it can be seen that the overall frequency of amplifiers in BNC is 81414, and its standard frequency is 787.12. While in SECCL, the frequency of twenty amplifiers is 8590, and the standard frequency is 1274.09. Although amplifiers appear more in BNC than in SECCL, the standard frequency of amplifiers in BNC is much smaller than that in SECCL. So According to the total standard frequencies of amplifiers in BNC and SECCL, Chinese learners use more amplifiers than native speakers do.

From the Table 1, it shows that in the top five amplifiers, three amplifiers “more”, “very”, “much” are all widely used both by native speakers and Chinese learners. The standard frequencies of “more” in BNC and SECCL are 162.64 and 259.12. The figures of “very” are 241.64 and 675.77. And the figures of “much” are 119.83 and 141.50. Chinese learners use these words quite frequently in their speaking. For “absolutely”, its standard frequencies in BNC and SECCL are 18.25 and 0.74. And the figures of “quite” are 104.89 and 36.49. The gap of the words in the two corpora is far large, which shows that Chinese learners perform “absolutely” and “quite” less than native speakers do. For “totally” and “badly”, the standard frequencies of the two words in SECCL are larger than those in BNC. It indicates that “totally” and “badly” are more frequently employed by Chinese learners than native speakers. However, some amplifiers like “fully”, “strongly”, “deeply” and “thoroughly” are all less frequently used in BNC and SECCL. The standard frequencies of “fully” in two corpora are 3.95 and 1.78. The figures of “strongly” are 2.04 and 1.33. The figures of “deeply” are 0.74 and 3.56. The figures of “thoroughly” are 1.18 and 0.15. The gap between their standard frequencies of these four words in BNC and SECCL is small, so both Chinese learners and native speakers seldom use these words.

Just focusing on the use of amplifiers in SECCL, we can see that the most frequently used amplifiers are mainly focused on “more”, “very” “too” and “much”. The top one is “very”. Its standard frequency is 675.77 which takes up 53% of the total standard frequencies in SECCL. Both in BNC and SECCL, “very” is the most frequently used amplifier. It shows that it is a popular amplifiers performed by native speakers and Chinese learners in their daily communication. Besides, the percent of the “very” is more than half, which means that among all overused amplifiers, Chinese learners overuse this word greatly. The second most frequently used one in SECCL is “more”. Its standard frequency is 259.12 that takes up 20% of the total standard frequencies in SECCL. The third one is “much” that takes up 11%. The forth one is “too” which takes up 6%. The total percent of the four overused amplifiers is 90%. The information can show that these three amplifiers almost occupy the total frequencies of amplifiers in SECCL. The three words are most frequently used by Chinese learners. Besides, comparing to the standard frequencies of these four words “completely”, “considerably”, “entirely”, and “absolutely” in BNC, the standard frequencies in SECCL are much lower. Therefore, we can tell that these four words are underused by Chinese learners. For “quite”, its standard frequency in SECCL is lower than that in BNC. This word is also underused by Chinese learners. The phenomenon is out of our expectation, because we think “quite” is a simple word that can be widely performed by Chinese learners. It should be also noted that the standard frequencies of “entirely” and “considerably” are both zero, which indicate that Chinese learners never perform these two words in their TEM-4 oral texts between 2003 and 2006.

The standard frequency of amplifiers in BNC indicates that native speakers are more likely to perform some certain amplifiers such as “more”, “very”, “quite” and “much”. Among these twenty amplifiers, “very” is the most frequently used amplifier which takes up 31% of the standard frequency of all amplifiers. And the least frequently used one is “greatly” which takes up 0.1%. As is shown in the table, each of amplifiers is more or less employed by native speakers.

In conclusion, it is obvious that Chinese learners have the tendency to overuse and underuse some amplifiers. The overused words are mainly “more”, “very”, “much” and “too”. And some amplifiers such as “completely”, “considerably”, “entirely”, and “absolutely” are underused by Chinese learners.

4.2 The Analysis of the Overuse of Amplifiers

4.2.1. Negative Transfer

Firstly, this phenomenon of overuse arises mainly due to Chinese learners’ negative transfer of their native language. In modern Chinese language, there is a phenomenon called redundancy. It refers to the information contained in language beyond the practical need. Some examples like “迅速抢救”，“彻底肃清”，“急速奔驰”等等. The center words contain the meaning that adverbials show. Redundancy is very common in Chinese language and amplifiers redundancy is just a small portion of the whole phenomenon. If asked to translate “彻底粉碎”into English, Chinese learners are more likely to get crushed to “thoroughly abolish” or “totally destroy” or “completely smash”. However, according to Pinkham’s view (Pinkham, 2000:236), these all belong to the expression of Chinese style English called Chinglish. Because “abolish”, “destroy” and “smash” itself already contain the meaning of adverbs “thoroughly”, “totally” and “completely”, so they do not need these adverbs to modify. Therefore, in the example of adverbs “thoroughly”, “totally” and “completely” belong to unnecessary modifier. The fact that Chinese learners overuse amplifiers on the whole is due to their mother tongue.

4.2.2 Age of Acquisition

It is due to Chinese learners’ second language acquisition. A large body of cognitive and psycholinguistic research has shown that adults can identify, produce and read aloud words learned early in life faster, and with fewer errors, than words learned some time later (Johnston amp; Barry, 2006:905). It is called age of acquisition effects. The earlier Chinese learners learn some words, the more frequently these words will be used. Table 1 shows that Chinese learners use “more”, “very”, “too” and “much” more frequently than native speakers do. These overused words are largely learned in the primary school, so students can have a long time to become more familiar with them so that they can have more flexible ways to perform them and use them more accurately. Except the top five amplifiers in table 1, it is obvious that Chinese learners use “totally”, “badly” more frequently than native speakers do. Age of acquisition effects can explain the phenomenon. Comparing to “considerably” and “entirely”, the two overused amplifiers are quite simple and acquired early in students’ age but not earlier than “very” and “much”. So they are performed more frequently than “entirely” but less frequently than “very” and “much”.

4.3 The Analysis of the Underuse of Amplifiers

4.3.1 The Lack of Productive Vocabulary

Vocabulary learning is the foundation of English learning. Laufer (Laufer, 1988:365) points that vocabulary is subdivided into two parts: receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. He also puts forward that there is a linguistic asymmetry between them and the receptive knowledge is superior to the productive one. There is a gap between the two kinds of vocabulary. Chinese learners may acquire the receptive vocabulary but are in short of the productive vocabulary. As we all know, a word has a multidimensional qualitative knowledge, including pronunciation, spelling, meaning, register, frequency, and grammatical and collocational patterns. So it is quite difficult for Chinese learners to learn all the functions of a word. When Chinese learners can know the meaning of a word and read it well in some certain content, it means that they have acquired the receptive knowledge. However, if they can not perform a word without any hints, they do not have the productive knowledge. It shows that the word is only receptive for Chinese learners. Chinese learners need enough time to change the receptive knowledge into the productive one. There is a say going that practice makes perfect. With lots practice, Chinese learners can get more productive knowledge. But the truth is they are in lack of practice and therefore short of the productive knowledge. That’s why they seldom use some words that they do not acquire well.

4.3.2 The Influence of Pronunciation Difficulties

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