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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源-自-751:,论'文'网]www.751com.cn
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 subpided into “maximizers” and “boosters”.
Amplifiers are pided 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.