Abstract Compared with the use of amplifiers in written English of American college students, this paper studies the use of amplifiers in written English of Chinese college students and reveals the characteristics that Chinese college students use amplifiers. To this end, it uses data of Written English Corpus Chinese Learners (WECCL) and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). This study employs Antconc to do some statistical analysis of twenty most commonly used words in the British National Corpus (BNC). The results show that: compared with native speakers, Chinese college students overuse either the maximizers or boosters，but for some amplifiers, such as “severely” “terribly” and “considerably”, they underuse. For the above phenomenon, this paper makes a tentative explanation from the following perspectives: communicative compensation strategies, negative transfer and age of acquisition.53000
Keywords: amplifier; booster; maximizer
摘要本文以美国大学生书面语中强势词使用情况作为对比，研究了中国大学生书面语中强势词的使用情况并揭示了中国大学生在强势词使用上的一些特点。为此，本研究使用了中国学生英语语料库和美国密西根大学高年级学生作文语料库中的一些数据。本研究采用Antconc语料检索软件对英国国家语料中使用最多的20个强势词进行了统计分析。研究结果表明: 与本族语者相比，无论是最高程度词还是增强程度词，中国大学生都存在过多使用的现象, 但对于有些强势词，例如“severely” “terribly” 和 “considerably”，中国英语学习者却使用不足。对上述现象，本文从交际补偿策略、母语负迁移和习得年龄等方面进行了解释。
毕业论文关键词：强势词；增强程度词；最高强化词
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature Review 1
2.1 The Definition of Amplifiers 1
2.2 The Researches on Amplifiers 2
3. Research Design 4
3.1 Research Material 4
3.2 Research Questions and Methods 5
4. Study Results 5
4.1 The General Description of Frequency 6
4.2 The Use of Maximizers 7
4.3 The Use of Boosters 8
5. The Analysis of Results 10
5.1 The Effect of Communicative Compensation Strategies 10
5.2 The Effect of Negative Transfer 11
5.3 The Effect of Age of Acquisition 12
6. Conclusion 13
Works Cited 15
1. Introduction
For nearly a century, especially in recent decades, amplifiers attracted interests of many researchers. 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 play a significant role in oral and written expression. By using amplifiers, we can express different degree of commitment, such as care and concern (e.g. fairly certain) and affirmation and stress (e.g. absolutely vital). In addition to expressing the social and emotional position of the speaker, these words also have the interpersonal function so that they can create a sense of belonging and collective. Labov (Labov, 1985:43) defined amplifiers as the emotional language that can express the social trends of language proposition, and pointed out that amplifiers were the most common emotional expression. Halliday (Halliday, 2004:127) noted that amplifiers expressed the metafunction of interpersonal function. 基于语料库的中国大学生书面语中强势词使用情况的研究:http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_57161.html