This research is a corpus-based study on the amplifiers in the texts of the TCCE.
2. Literature Review
This part has been pided 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 pided 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 & 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 & 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 & 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. 《21世纪大学英语》文本中的强势词研究(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_58899.html