A Contrastive Study On Extended Units Of Meaning Of Amplifiers Between Ma Theses And International Journal Articles

Amplifiers can increase the intensity of semantic degree,and strengthen the tone of speakers or writers.In interpersonal function,amplifiers can not only express an interpersonal message,but also signal personal commitment or judgment of truth and value.Previous studies on amplifiers used in learners' writings find that it is problematic for the learners to use amplifiers appropriately.Among these studies,most of them have been conducted on the use of amplifiers in oral production or argumentative writing,and the investigated points were merely on word frequency,collocation,colligation or semantic prosody respectively.However,these studies do not provide much attention to the Extended Units of Meaning(EUM)of amplifiers in academic writing.Thus,the present study makes a contrastive analysis on the EUM of amplifiers between MA Corpus and IJA Corpus.The research questions of this study are as follows:(1)What are the EUM of the high-frequency amplifiers in Chinese MA theses and International Journal Articles respectively?(2)In terms of EUM,what are the similarities and differences of high-frequency amplifiers between Chinese MA theses and international journal articles?The research procedures are as follows: Based on MA Corpus and IJA Corpus,this paper uses BFSU Power Conc1.0 to retrieve the concordance lines and calculate the raw frequency of each amplifier in both corpora,thus get high-frequency amplifiers,including 4 maximizers and 2 boosters.By the model of EUM,this paper attempts to analyze the differences and similarities of the units of meaning of the 6 high-frequency amplifiers in the two corpora.The major findings are:(1)On the whole,in MA Corpus and IJA Corpus,the EUM of amplifiers have similarities in collocation and colligation,while great differences in semantic preference and semantic prosody.(2)At the level of collocation and colligation,collocates of some maximizers in MA Corpus are lack of diversity.Besides,some maximizers tend to be overused.In addition,there are some colligation patterns of maximizers occurring frequently in MA Corpus,whereas fewer in IJA Corpus.This language phenomenon may be influenced by L1 transfer.(3)At the level of semantic preference and semantic prosody,the MA students tend to be subjective in some collocations of maximizers and boosters,whereas the international journal authors have a preference to objective expression.Besides,some MA students tend to mix up semantic prosody in collocates of maximizers and boosters,which could be explained that MA students neglect the differences of pragmatic meanings.This study shows that Chinese MA students have certain similarities with international journal authors at the level of collocation and colligation of amplifiers,whereas significant differences at the level of semantic preference and semantic prosody,which result in the blurred academic stances and tentative commitments of Chinese MA students.It is suggested that MA students should accurately grasp the units of meaning of each amplifier both in semantic preference and semantic prosody,with a view to improving the quality of academic papers.