A Contrastive Study Of Amplifiers In Chinese And International English Academic Writing Based On Extened Units Of Meaning

Amplifiers,as degree words to enhance the nature or state of things,have the function of strengthening mood and they are indispensable parts in daily communication and academic writings.The extended units of meaning takes the collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody as a whole to comprehensively describe the usage characteristics of node words,so that learners can properly master them.Previous studies have mostly taken argumentative or spoken English as a genre,examining the characteristics of amplifiers from a single perspective of frequency,collocation,colligation or semantic prosody,while the studies,taking science English academic writing as a genre to examine the four aspects of EUM as a whole,are relatively few.In view of this,this study makes a comparative analysis of the EUM of amplifiers in the Chinese science scholars’ journal articles and international science scholars’ journal articles which are all written in English.The research questions in this study include:(1)What are the frequency characteristics of high-frequency amplifiers used in the corpus of Chinese science scholars’ journal articles and the corpus of international science scholars’ journal articles? What are the differences?(2)What are the EUM of high-frequency amplifiers in the two corpora respectively?(3)In terms of EUM,what are the similarities and differences of high-frequency amplifiers between the two corpora? The specific research steps are as follows: based on the corpora of Chinese and international science scholars’ journal articles,the classification listed by Quirk et al.(1985)and high-frequency amplifiers listed by Kennedy(2003),this study uses Wordsmith 6.0 to search and count the frequency of amplifiers in the two corpora one by one.The first six high-frequency amplifiers are selected as the research objects,their EUM characteristics in collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody are explored,and the similarities and differences of these characteristics in the two corpora are compared and analyzed.The results show that Chinese scholars use amplifiers relatively infrequently and lack assertive confidence relatively.The EUM has the following characteristics:(1)In the aspect of collocation,there is a lack of diversity in the types and inflections,and certain boosters’ collocations are overused;(2)In the aspect of colligation,there are no various colligations,and even one booster lacks certain colligaton or uses it too little.This phenomenon may be influenced by mother tongue transfer and language level;(3)In theaspect of semantic preference,Chinese scholars can properly grasp its preference characteristics;(4)In the aspect of semantic prosody,Chinese scholars have unique semantic prosody features when using certain amplifiers.These show that Chinese scholars ignore the differences between pragmatic meanings and their pragmatic awareness is relatively weak.These results suggest that Chinese scholars are significantly less frequent than international scholars in the use of amplifiers.Moreover,certain collocations are overused,and certain amplifiers are lack diversity in colligation.There are differences in the use of semantic prosody.Therefore,Chinese scholars need to pay more attention to the EUM of amplifiers in native speakers’ English academic writing,and use appropriate collocations and various colligations in future writing,so as to improve the credibility of Chinese scholars’ academic views and the quality of academic writing.