Data-based Comparative Studies Of Degree Adverbs

In daily communication, degree adverbs (DAs) are commonly used to reinforce speakers'tone and attitude, which directly influence the realization of interpersonal metafunction. In appraisal theory, Martin and White discuss the importance of DAs, arguing that intensification, which is mainly realized by DAs, interacts with attitude to either increase or decrease the 'volume'of that attitude as evaluative prosodies are set up across the text. However, the usage of DAs is by no means easy to grasp, and it is hard for Chinese English learners to have a good command of DAs as native speakers do.Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, the author of this thesis mainly focuses on comparing the usage of DAs between Chinese advanced English learners and native speakers in both spoken and written English. First of all, software AntConc is used to search for DAs'concordances across the two corpora SECCL (1 million words) and WECCL (1 million words), and then, Corpus Concordance is operated to study DAs in BNC-Spoken (1 million words) and BNC-Written (1 million words). Through observing and comparing DAs'frequency, collocation, colligation, semantic prosody and stylistic feature from the four corpora, the similarities and differences of using DAs by Chinese advanced English learners and native speakers are discussed.The results show that, on the whole, Chinese advanced English learners can grasp the usage of DAs in accordance with native speakers whether in typical colligation, collocation, semantic prosody or stylistic feature. However, the difference from the above data study shows that Chinese English learners by far do not have sufficient knowledge of DAs, which is mainly manifested as follows,Chinese students tend to rely on limited DAs, which unavoidably results in the overuse of what they are familiar with and inefficiency of those they are not. As to stylistic feature, Chinese advanced English learners and native speakers can not reach an agreement with native speakers on some DAs. They also use some collocations which are not recognized by native speakers. What's more, regarding semantic prosody, the word perfectly can collocate with negative words, which is not supposed to happen in native English expression.Without doubt, this corpus-based comparative study of DAs will be of great help to both language teachers and language learners.