A Contrastive Study Of Synonymous English Intensifiers From The Perspective Of Extended Units Of Meaning

Intensifiers are frequently used in spoken and written English.However,it is common that many CEL(Chinese English learners)choose to use them based on their literal meanings without further considering whether they are appropriately used in the context.They tend to use intensifiers,especially synonymous intensifiers,with great arbitrariness which may lead to inappropriate uses or even misuses.However,up to now,most CEL have not realized the importance of learning intensifiers although they have made so many mistakes in choosing an appropriate English intensifier.The present study adopted extended units of meaning proposed by Sinclair to study the use of three synonymous intensifiers by CEL and NES(native English speakers)and make a comparison between CEL and NES in the use of them.To be more specific,the characteristics of CEL and NES in the use of intensifiers will be investigated from collocation,colligation,semantic prosody and semantic preference.Three synonymous intensifiers selected are completely,fully,totally.The present study is a comparative study of two groups of people,so two corpora WECCL and COCA are selected as the source of language materials.Intensifiers completely,fully,totally are taken as node words.Significant collocates of each intensifier with MI value above 3 and the span of 4 are picked out for further analysis and accidental collocates are excluded in order to make results more scientific and reliable.With the help of AntConc 3.4.3,the concordance lines of each intensifier can be extracted from WECCL and COCA.By referring to significant collocates and corresponding concordance lines,collocation,colligation,semantic prosody and semantic preference of each node word in WECCL and COCA are identified.At last,a comparison is made to find out differences between CEL and NES in the use of completely,fully,totally.The findings of the present study are as follows.(1)CEL prefer collocating each intensifier with different words and the collocates of them seldom overlap but in the use by NES,completely and totally share many collocates.In addition,CEL and NES show their own preferences for collocates of each intensifier and the collocation patterns used by CEL are not as variable as NES.(2)CEL have difficulty commanding colligations of completely and totally.Although they have the same colligation types as NES,the proportion of each colligation differs significantly.(3)The semantic prosodies of completely,fully and totally show significant differences.For CEL,completely and totally bear a mixed semantic prosody mixed by positive and negative semantic prosodies and fully bears a mixed semantic prosody mixed by positive and neutral semantic prosodies.For NES,completely and to,tally show negative semantic prosody and fully exhibits a mixed semantic prosody mixed by positive and neutral semantic prosodies.(4)Each intensifier has its own most commonly used semantic preference no matter in the use by CEL or NES.It is concluded that CEL have not commanded the usage of intensifiers well.Therefore,there is still a long way to go for CEL to use intensifiers like NES Moreover,completely,fully and totally are not absolute synonyms.Thus,more efforts should be put on the differentiation of synonymous intensifiers.