A Study Of The Treatment Of Deadjective Intensifiers In English Learner’s Dictionaries

Intensifiers are words that express the semantic role of degree. They play animportant role in spoken and written language, and the researches of them involvesuch aspects as semantics, collocation, syntax and pragmatics and the like. Thedevelopment of corpus linguistics and the advent of different corpora facilitate thestudy of intensifiers. However, systematic study of the treatment of deadjectivalintensifiers in English leaner’s dictionaries has hardly ever been touched upon so far,let alone analysis by means of corpora.The present study employs four large dictionaries for advanced English learners,namely, Oxford Advanced English Learner’s Dictionary (7thedition), LongmanDictionary of Contemporary English (4thedition), and Macmillan Dictionary forAdvanced Learners (1stEdition) and Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’sDictionary (5th Edition), collecting deadjectival intensifiers (DIs for short) endingwith suffix–ly from the four dictionaries. From the perspective of Usage-BasedTheory, through a combination of dictionary survey and corpus survey, this studyprobes into the treatment of the entries for DIs and the representation of theintensifying senses.In this research, we find that frequency really makes the major criterion for theselection of headwords and that high-frequency DIs are more likely to getconventionalized and then gain headword status in dictionaries, and thus theconventionalized intensifying uses and meanings of these DIs are represented.Through a detailed analysis of DIs, we find that many DIs have ambiguous meaningsand poly-functional nature and that they acquire additional intensifying effect withretention of the meanings from their bases. However, the sense of intensification anduses as intensifiers tend to be absent as a result of the practice to treat DIs asundefined run-ons. In terms of the treatment of DIs in dictionaries, it is advisable totreat those DIs that partially or hardly corresonde to their adjectival counterparts asheadwords and to represent the corresponding senses. Finally, this study demonstrates that morphologically derived words can be researched under the guidance of UBTwith the methodological support of corpus-based pattern analysis.This study can not only help to further the linguistic study of derived intensifiers,but also have important reference value for solving the problem in treating derivativesin dictionary making to some extent.