The Use Of English Intensifiers To Modify Adverb Particles Or Prepositional Phrases

English intensifiers play an increasingly important part in daily language communication.They can be used to enhance the intensity of discourse,thereby indicating the speaker’s tone and mood,and achieving communication functions.This study took nine intensifiers(WAY,JUST,ABOVE,WELL,RIGHT,DIRECTLY,ALL,STRAIGHT,and CLOSE)as examples.The concordance lines were obtained from the two corpora of Written BNCweb and CLEC.Focusing on the nine node words,their collocates and distributions of semantic prosody were obtained.AntConc 3.5.8 and SPSS 16.0 were used to analyze the collected statistics and features of the nine words.Based on evidence from written BNC and CLEC,this study intends to contrast Chinese EFL learners’ and native English speakers’ actual use of English intensifiers to modify adverb particles or prepositional phrases in terms of collocation and semantic prosody.The general research question is hereby raised what differences there are between native speakers and Chinese-speaking learners in their use of English intensifiers modifying adverb particles or prepositional phrases.To answer the general question,firstly it is of significance to find out how native speakers and Chinese-speaking learners use English intensifiers to modify adverb particles or prepositional phrases.Secondly,it is meaningful to find out what intensifiers tend to collocate with adverb particles or prepositional phrases,and the shared semantic features of those intensifiers modifying adverb particles or prepositional phrases.Therefore,three specific research questions are specified as follows.Sub-question 1: How do native speakers use English intensifiers to modify adverb particles or prepositional phrases,as evidenced in written BNCweb?Sub-question 2: How do Chinese-speaking English learners use English intensifiers to modify adverb particles or prepositional phrases,as evidenced in written CLEC?Sub-question 3: What are the similarities and differences between native speakers and Chinese-speaking English learners in their use of English intensifiers modifying adverb particles or prepositional phrases,in terms of collocation and semantic prosody?The results of this study indicate that native English speakers use intensifiers to modify adverb particles more naturally than Chinese learners,and Chinese English learners tend to overuse intensifiers to modify prepositional phrases than native English speakers.The results hold some important implications for English teaching and learning in the Chinese context.First,teacher should help learners pay adequate attention to the frequency of vocabulary use.By frequency,the usage of vocabulary by native speakers can be figured out,which may facilitate the designing of English learning materials.Secondly,it is necessary for teacher to cultivate students’ stylistic awareness,helping them to choose the most suitable form for use in a certain style and avoid misuse(e.g.,speaking in written language).Finally,corpus linguistic research methods can be incorporated into foreign language teaching to facilitate students’ learning of vocabulary.Students can even be taught to use corpora to enhance their autonomous learning of vocabulary.