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. 53104
Keywords: amplifiers; overuse; underuse; spoken English
摘要本文利用英语国家语料库和中国学生口语语料库对中国英语学习者的增强词的使用情况进行调查研究，并借助搜索软件AntConc进行数据分析。研究发现中国英语学习者对该类词既有使用过多又有使用过少的现象。经过研究,他们过多使用的增强语,主要集中在more, very, much和too四个词上。母语负迁移和英语习得时间是导致过多使用增强词的原因。当然，中国学习者过少使用某些增强词，例如completely, considerably, entirely, 和absolutely。这是因为他们输出性词汇缺乏，并且这些单词发音困难，所以中国学习者在口语交流中很少使用这些词。
毕业论文关键词：增强词；过多使用；过少使用；口语
Contents
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
1. Introduction
In daily communication, amplifiers are used to suggest the reader what emotion he should feel. Amplifier is a means to strength semantic degree of a sentence. By naming an emotion within the predicate, the writer compels the reader to consider this emotion and hence he begins to feel it. Besides, people can show their attitudes including pride, deep impressions, persuasion and abuse by using these kinds of words. Moreover, using amplifiers efficiently can show a high level of English ability. The accuracy of expressing English is affected by overusing or misusing intensifiers. And by using amplifiers, the writer can express different degree of commitment. For instance, “a very lovely cat” as compared to “a lovely cat”, the former phrase has a higher effect than the latter one. “Very” is an amplifier which reveals the speaker’s happy feeling about the cat. This paper focuses on the use of amplifiers. Amplifiers are used to stress speakers’ tones. It is frequent for Chinese learners of English to use amplifiers to express their feelings. Therefore, it is significant to do a lot of researches on the use of amplifiers which can give many useful suggestions to Chinese learners. 中国英语学习者在口语中增强词的调查研究:http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_57165.html