论文总字数：27621字

摘 要

本研究以语料库研究方法为基础，以英语国家语料库为参照语料库，研究强势词在《21世纪大学英语》文本中的使用情况。研究问题涉及强势词在《21世纪大学英语》文本中是否存在超用或少用现象。研究结果表明：1）就整体而言，所选强势词在《21世纪大学英语》文本与英语国家语料库中的频数分布没有显著性的差异；2）在《21世纪大学英语》文本中，某些强势词存在一定的超用现象，比如“badly”，而有一些词则存在少用现象，如“quite”。其后，根据所得结论，提出了简单教学建议，包括老师更注重 “badly”等强势词的教学以及鼓励学生在强势词方面多进行自主学习。

关键词：强势词；超用；少用；《21世纪大学英语》

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 The Definition of Amplifier 1

2.2 The Researches on the Amplifiers 2

3. Research Design 3

3.1 Research Questions 3

3.2 Research Materials 4

3.3Research Method 4

4. Results and Analysis 4

4.1 Description of the Frequency of Amplifiers 4

4.2 Overused Amplifiers 6

4.3Underused Amplifiers 8

5. Conclusion 10

Works Cited 12

1. Introduction

Intensifier plays an important role in language communication. One could strengthen the semantics of what they say and highlight the key information if he or she uses an intensifier. From the semantic perspective, an intensifier is used to modify adjectives, adverbs, verbs and prepositional phrases, representing the degree of the quality or state of something; from the perspective of functional grammar, an intensifier can realize the interpersonal function, expressing the speaker"s tone and manner. What’s more, amplifier is an important part of intensifier. Amplifiers can strengthen the function of the semantics and intensify the degree gradually, such as completely，absolutely，very much .etc. The use of amplifiers is restricted by many things such as words, semantics, syntax and text. Therefore, the use of amplifiers is full of complexity and is worth studying. Nowadays, college English teaching materials play a very important role in the college in China. For teachers, preparing lessons, interpretation of the teaching contents, as well as the evaluation at the learning effectiveness of a student are dependent on the teaching materials. For students, drawing and construction of knowledge points, vocabulary acquisition and cross-cultural communication ability, after-school reviewing and preparing for CET exams, also cannot leave the college English teaching materials. As the most widely used college English teaching material, the study on the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY COLLEGE ENGLISH (TCCE) shows its importance.

This research is a corpus-based study on the amplifiers in the texts of the TCCE.

2. Literature Review

This part has been divided into three parts. The first part is the explanation and illustration of the term "amplifier"; the second part is the review of some researches on amplifiers; the third part is the illustration of the deficiency of the researches.

2.1 The Definition of Amplifier

Amplifier is a tool, used to deepen the impression, praise, persuasion, insult, and usually affect the listeners when accept information (Partington, 1993:177). Amplifiers scale upwards from an assumed norm. They are divided into maximizers, which can denote the upper extreme of the scale, and boosters, which denote a high degree, a high point on the scale. Both of these two, but especially boosters, form open classes, and new expressions are frequently created to replace older ones whose impact follows the trend of hyperbole in rapidly growing ineffectual (Quirk, 1985:589).

In some cases, the amplifiers co-occur with a semantic class of verbs, for example “greatly” with verbs having a favorable implication and “utterly” with verbs having an unfavorable implication (Quirk, 1985:593).

2.2 The Researches on the Amplifiers

From the 1990s.the corpus-based study on intensifiers have been produced and developed. Quite a lot of surveys have been done in recent years on the use of intensifiers home and abroad.

There are many researches on intensifiers or amplifiers abroad. Altenberg (Altenberg, 1991:345) shows that “very”, “so”, “very much”, “terribly”, “jolly”, “extremely” are widely used in native English speakers. Biber ( Biber, 2000:367) sums up that “very”, “so” and “too” is the most frequently used three intensifiers in native English speakers. What’s more, the condition of the English learners also attracts much attention. Granger (Granger, 1998:112) shows that the French English learners use the amplifiers “completely” and “totally” at excessive degree and at the same time use “highly” little in his research.

The usage of the amplifiers by Chinese English learners is also paid attention too. Huang (Huang Ruihong, 2007:57) investigates the semantic prosody of adjective amplifiers used by Chinese learners of English based on CLEC and BNC and works out that the semantic prosody as revealed in learner corpus is generally in accordance with that of native speakers. However, the type, frequency and the range of the collocation of amplifiers vary with learners" language proficiency. According to Ding and He (Ding Rongrong amp; He Fusheng, 2006:32 ), they end with their research 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. In Chen and Ma"s research (Chen Ying amp; Ma Wulin, 2012:48), they target with the intensifying phrase “very much”. They found 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. In Wang and Chen"s research (Wang Haihua amp; Chen Guohua, 2007:52), the two professors pay attention to the developmental features of Chinese EFL Learner"s use of amplifier collocations. They found that the number of collocation tokens of maximizers grows as the language proficiency advances, indicating that more proficient learners have a wider vocabulary at their disposal and the learners at high school significantly overuse the three "all-round" intensifiers: so, very, and very much.

The development of corpus linguistics provides a unique perspective for the teaching material evaluation, especially on vocabulary evaluation. Kennedy (Kennedy, 1998:496) illustrates the connections between corpus-based researches and teaching material. Huston (Huston, 2002:304) works out the three perspectives of the corpus linguistics which are the base of the teaching material evaluation.

We can clearly see from the above that researches on amplifiers are all the researches on the usage of amplifiers by the English learners. Actually, they often conclude the characteristics of usage of amplifiers by different English learners. However, they seldom turn to the field that whether a textbook is suitable for English learners to learn. They ignore the learning resources. We also have some researches on textbooks. However, the two fields are separate. No researches pay attention to the amplifiers in one particular textbook. Therefore, in this research, amplifier will be a study target in the texts of TCCE. The target amplifiers are: more, very, too, quite, much, far, highly, fully, completely, entirely, extremely, absolutely, totally, strongly, badly, deeply, greatly, altogether, considerably and thoroughly. These amplifiers are the most frequent used amplifiers in native English-speaking countries. (Leech, 2001:345) After the research, the learners will better use the TCCE to learn how to use the amplifiers more accurately and effectively.

3. Research Design

3.1 Research Questions

From the literature review part, it is concluded that the main researches on amplifiers are almost the similar questions such as how English learners use amplifiers differently from the native English speakers does. They seldom involve the questions like whether a textbook is suitable for English learners to learn how to use an amplifier. Therefore, according to the previous study and this study itself, here come the questions: 1) do the frequencies of amplifiers used in TCCE and BNC show any differences; 2) if there exist some difference, what are the features of the amplifiers used in TCCE?

3.2 Research Materials

This research has employed two corpora.

The first one is the collection of Reading texts in the TCCE. The TCCE is a set of college English teaching material for two-year college English teaching. This set of books is written according to the published college English syllabus .The texts in this set of books are chosen from the native English-speaking texts. These texts are something about philosophy, biography, education, society, politics, and cultural differences and so on. The words of the texts are about 57913.

The second part is the collection of writings in the British National Corpus (short for BNC). The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. This research mainly uses the writing part of the BNC. The written part in BNC has about 3144 texts and has about 87278205 words.

The chosen amplifiers in this research 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 the most frequent used amplifiers in native English speaking countries (Leech, 2001:571)

3.3Research Method

The research uses the BNC (writing part) as a reference corpus to study the amplifiers in TCCE. The Antconc software is used to search the data. Based on the obtained data, the analysis will be given.

4. Results and Analysis

4.1 Description of the Frequency of Amplifiers

This part mainly introduces the result data and explanation of the amplifiers in the written part of BNC and TCCE texts, the data is contained in the following Table 1: Amplifiers in BNC and TCCE.

Table 1 is the gathering information about the usage of the selected twenty amplifiers in TCCE texts and BNC written texts.

Table 1: Amplifiers in BNC and TCCE

We keep the frequency and standard frequency of the selected twenty amplifiers in the selected two corpora. Among them, the standard frequency of the data is calculated according to the following formula :( frequency/total number)*100000.

Choosing the standard frequency as a reference data, we can clearly analyze the frequency distribution of the selected twenty amplifiers in TCCE texts and BNC written texts.

Upon retrieval, the frequency of the selected twenty amplifiers in TCCE text is 463 and its standard frequency is 799.50. In BNC written texts, the selected twenty amplifiers have appeared 551764 times and the standard frequency data is 632.20. Compared with the two sets of the data, it can see that the selected twenty amplifiers appear a little more in TCCE texts than that in BNC written texts. But the figures are relatively approximate; the gap between the two figures is not very big. What"s more, we can see directly from the Table 1 that the three amplifiers “very”, “too” and “more” are all widely used in TCCE and BNC. The standard frequency of “more” in TCCE texts and BNC written texts are 286.64 and 218.09 and the figures of “very” are 108.78 and 107.13 and the figures of “too” are 107.06 and 68.26. The frequencies of the first five amplifiers in TCCE and BNC are also approximate. At the same time, the amplifiers “altogether”, “considerably” and “thoroughly” are all fewer used in TCCE texts and BNC written texts than the other amplifiers. The figures of “altogether” are 1.73 and 3.16, the figures of “considerably” are 1.73 and 3.14 and the figures of “thoroughly” are 1.73 and 2.19. According to the data, although the figures are different, the three amplifiers are all few used in the two selected corpora. Some other words, such as “much”, “far”, “extremely”, are used somewhat differently in the two corpora. However, the differences are not apparent and negligible. The usage of those words is almost the same. Therefore, on the whole, there is no significant difference between the usages of amplifiers in TCCE texts and the written part of BNC, in other words, the usage of amplifiers in TCCE texts just follow the conventions of native English speaking countries.

4.2 Overused Amplifiers

However, in TCCE texts, not all amplifiers are used the same as that in BNC written texts. Some words are overused, they are: badly, deeply, greatly, and entirely. According to Table 1, it is simple for us to obtain that some of the selected 20 are used apparently differently in TCCE from that in BNC. Some words are obviously overused. In order to further analyze the data, it will just choose the amplifiers in TCCE whose frequency in TCCE texts is 5 or higher than 5 and eliminate some less used amplifiers. Some words appearing less than five times in TCCE texts will not be recognized as the overused amplifiers. The reserved amplifiers are: more, much, very, far, quite, entirely, highly, badly, deeply and greatly. Compare the data of these eleven words in TCCE and BNC, it is found that in contrast to the usage in BNC written texts, some amplifiers in the text of TCCE are obviously overused, they are: entirely, badly, deeply and greatly. In terms of the standard frequency of these four amplifiers, the data in TCCE is significantly higher than that of BNC written texts.

Among the overused amplifiers, the amplifier “badly” is apparently differently used in the two selected corpora. Its standard frequency in BNC written texts is 4.43, while in TCCE texts ,its standard frequency is 8.63 .The standard frequency of “badly” in TCCE texts is almost the twice as that in BNC written texts.

We conclude from Table1 that the amplifier “badly” is rather overused in the texts of TCCE. In order to analyze the usage of “badly” further in the texts of TCCE, we search this word again in the texts of TCCE. We get the following sentences:

1) I’ve enjoyed playing the piano badly for years.

2) I also enjoy singing badly and drawing badly.

3) Unfortunately, doing things badly has gone out of style.

4) I should be stumbling gracelessly around the golf course and playing badly in no time at all.

The above sentences are the sentences in the texts of TCCE who contain the amplifier “badly”. According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, the word “badly” has six meanings. The first is not skillfully or not carefully；the second is not successfully; the third is not in an acceptable way; the fourth is in a way that makes people get a bad opinion about something ; the fifth meaning is used to emphasize how much you want or need; the sixth meaning is used to emphasize how serious a situation or an event is. We can have a look at these meanings; it’s not difficult for us to find that the amplifier “badly” with something often has an unfavorable implication while the fifth meaning can replaced by “very much”. The fifth meaning can also be unfavorable or favorable, in other words, the semantic prosody of “badly” can be positive and negative.

However, the sentences in the texts of the TCCE have some problems in using “badly”. It is concluded that all the examples in these sentences have unfavorable meanings. At this point, “badly” is overused. Furthermore, the first three sentences even come from one text and this mean “badly” is overused in the text. However, these sentences lack the usage of favorable meanings. At this point, the usage of “badly” in the texts of TCCE may be a misleading. Some students may think that “badly” can only be used as unfavorable image and the students will ignore the favorable meanings of “badly”. Therefore, when the teacher is teaching this amplifier, she or he should pay more attention to this and do some adding. Here are some sentences that are chosen from the BNC texts, they may be the example sentences in class:

1) He missed her badly.

2) They were badly in need of help.

The two sentences are all chosen from the BNC texts. The meanings of “badly” in these two sentences are all favorable meanings. And it is found that these two sentences all come from the texts in 21^st century.

4.3Underused Amplifiers

As is mentioned in the last section, parts of the amplifiers are overused in TCCE. From Table 1, it can be also concluded that some words are underused in TCCE texts, they are: quite, fully, altogether, considerably, and thoroughly. Then, the amplifier “quite”, its standard frequency in TCCE text is 17.27, and the standard frequency in BNC written is 32.84. The amplifier “quite” in TCCE texts is less used obviously. We then come to the amplifier “fully”, its standard frequency in TCCE texts is 1.73 while its standard frequency is 9.48 in the written part of BNC. Obviously, the amplifier “fully” is underused in TCCE texts. In addition, from the Table 1, it’s not difficult to find that although some of the words are used closely in the two corpora in the aspect of standard frequency, they only appear once or none in the TCCE texts .We can also conclude that those words are less used in TCCE texts. Those amplifiers are: altogether, considerably and thoroughly. So it comes to the conclusion that “quite” “fully” “altogether” “considerably” and “thoroughly” are underused in the TCCE texts. We will talk about some of these words in detail.

From Table 1, it gets that “quite” “fully” “altogether” “considerably” and “thoroughly” are underused in the texts of TCCE. We search some of these words again in TCCE texts.

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