Abstract

This thesis attempts to conduct a corpus-based study of the use of amplifiers in British National Corpus (BNC) and Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL), with the help of corpus search software AntConc. It is concluded that the overuse and the underuse tendency co-exist in the use of amplifiers. And after researching on the amplifiers, it is shown that some amplifiers are overused by Chinese learners. The overused words are mainly “more”, “very”, “much” and “too”. It is due to Chinese learners’ negative transfer and the age of acquisition. Certainly, Chinese learners also underuse some amplifiers such as “completely”, “considerably”, “entirely”, and “absolutely”, because they are in lack of productive vocabulary. And they have difficulties with the pronunciation of these words. As a result, they seldom use these amplifiers in their communication. 

Keywords: amplifiers; overuse; underuse; spoken English

Contents

Abstract

摘要

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