Distribution Of English Adverbial Maximizers

Intensifiers are a type of words enhancing or weakening expressive intensity. In communication, intensifiers can heighten or weaken tones or express different degrees, thus achieving the intended communicative purpose. Because of their frequent use in written and spoken English, intensifiers have long been discussed and studied both at home and abroad. Previous studies were mainly conducted on the basis of corpora for the reason that corpora can provide authentic information and data, thus ensuring the objectivity and reliability of the research results. The researchers mainly studied intensifiers from the perspectives of word frequency, collocation, colligation and semantic prosody. The present research, adopting the corpus-based approach and employing the perspective of sociolinguistics, chose to investigate the distribution features of maximizers--one subtype of intensifiers.Maximizers can express absolute extremeness on a scale or convey a very high degree and are frequently used in daily and social communication. Considering the fact that previous researches mainly studied the collocation and semantic prosody of intensifiers, the present thesis chose to investigate the distribution of maximizers between spoken and written English, among different written text domains, between different genders of speakers, among different age groups of speakers, and among different social classes of speakers.The British National Corpus (BNC) was employed as the research instrument as well as data pool of the thesis. To guarantee that the research subjects are truly English native speakers, the author set two subcorpora in BNC:written subcorpus and spoken subcorpus. The materials of written subcorpus were from written texts by American or British English native speakers, and those of spoken subcorpus came from speech transcripts of American or British English native speakers. Then the author used the procedure of "Frequency breakdown" to select the top10frequently used maximizers in the two subcorpora and studied their distribution features as specified above.The current research employed a mixed-method approach (i.e., mixing quantitative and qualitative methods) to analyze the distribution information of the chosen maximizers. In terms of the distribution of maximizers between spoken and written English, the thesis used Log-Likelihood Calculator to analyze the retrieved data. With regards to the distribution of maximizers in other aspects such as the distribution in different text domains, the author conducted qualitative analysis, extracting and generalizing their distribution features based on data obtained from the two subcorpora.Based on the analysis of the retrieved information, the author drew the following five conclusions concerning the distribution of the selected maximizers.(1) In terms of the distribution of the maximizers between spoken and written English, most, fully, entirely, extremely, perfectly and altogether are more likely to be used in written English while quite, completely, totally and absolutely are more likely to be used in spoken English.(2) As to the distribution of maximizers in different text domains, quite, altogether, completely, absolutely and perfectly are more often used in humanistic works while most, entirely, fully, extremely and totally appear more frequently in scientific works.(3) With respect to the distribution of maximizers between different genders of speakers, most, completely, fully, entirely, extremely, perfectly, and altogether are more frequently used by male speakers while quite, totally, and absolutely are more preferred by female speakers.(4) In regard to the distribution of maximizers among different age groups of speakers, except for altogether which is used more by speakers above the age of45, all the other nine maximizers tend to be used more by young adults between25and44.(5) For the distribution of maximizers among different social classes of speakers, most, fully, entirely, absolutely, and altogether are more frequently used by speakers of the AB class, while quite, completely, totally, extremely, and perfectly are more preferred by speakers of the DE class.Through the investigation of the distribution of the maximizers, the present research has verified the theories or ideas about varieties of language, provided a new perspective for sociolinguistic research, and enriched the studies of intensifiers, other kinds of words, and even other linguistic phenomena. Most importantly, this research may hold some implications, methodologically, for foreign language teaching and learning.