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.

Keywords: amplifier; booster; maximizer

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-1

2.1 The Definition of Amplifiers-1

2.2 The Researches on Amplifiers-3

3. Research Design-4

3.1 Research Material-5

3.2 Research Questions and Methods-5

4. Study Results-6

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-14