Amplifiers In English Academic Papers By Chinese And Native English Postgraduates:a Corpus-based Comparative Study Based On COFS And MICUSP

This thesis adopts a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis approach and makes a comparative study on the use of amplifiers between English postgraduates of Guangxi Normal University and postgraduates of Michigan University in their theses. It tries to explore the characteristics of amplifiers used by English postgraduates of Guangxi Normal University and find the similarities and differences between Chinese English learners and English native speakers.The two corpora employed in this study are composed of413theses written by English postgraduates of Guangxi Normal University and287theses written by postgraduates of Michigan University. The former is considered as target corpus, and the second as reference corpus.According to the list of amplifiers in Kennedy (2003). the author took24amplifiers as the items to study, and then used AntConc to retrieve the frequency of amplifiers and generate the collocate list of amplifiers. By virtue of the Log-likelihood Ration Calculator (Xu Jiajin,2009), the author analyzes the similarities and differences between the two corpora. The results show that:1) On the whole, the types and tokens of amplifiers used by English postgraduates of Guangxi Normal University are comparable to that used by English native speakers. However, according to Log-likelihood ratio, there are some significant differences between the individual amplifiers. In the use of maximizers, Chinese English learners significantly overuse absolutely, totally and underuse entirely; while in the use of boosters, they obviously overuse very, really, badly, deeply and greatly, and underuse particularly, highly, extremely, heavily and incredibly. In one word, the overuse of these amplifiers appears to be associated with the inclination to use colloquial language in academic writings.2) As for amplifier collocations, the results show that English postgraduates of Guangxi Normal University tend to employ maximizers to amplify non-gradable adjectives and boosters to intensify gradable ones.3) Generally speaking, the semantic prosody of these amplifier collocations used by English postgraduates of Guangxi Normal University is similar to that of English native speakers. Except from that completely tends to co-occur with negative items in English native speakers’ writings, while collocate with mixed prosody items in Chinese English learners’ writings.4) According to the analysis of types and tokens of-ly adverbs+important/different, the result has shown that English postgraduates of Guangxi Normal University tend to overuse amplifiers to intensify the meaning of collocate in order to cover up their lexical insufficiency.5) Surprisingly, several groups of amplifier combinations that are frequently used in spoken language occur in Chinese English learners’ writings, such as "very, very","really, really" and "completely, completely", and they are used to modify adjectives for increasing the intensity degree scale. This finding further proves that colloquial language has not been removed in English learners’ writings.Finally, this paper briefly states some pedagogical implications and suggests that teachers should apply English native speakers’ corpus into the university, which supply considerable amount of authentic materials, and help the EFL learners learn idiomatic English. The author hopes this study could provide reference for the future research on the academic papers or the academic teaching.