A COCA-based Study On "-1y" Emotive Intensifiers

Adverbs including intensifiers (or degree adverbs) are treated as nouns, verbs andadjectives in languages position and are one of four content words. Because adverbs cannot only modify verbs、modify adjectives, but they can also modify a whole sentence orsentences’ propositions, adverbs reinforce speakers’ tone, express speakers’ attitudestowards propositions and directly influence the realization of interpersonal function.Therefore, many researchers studied them from perspective of their stance, subjectivity,grammaticalization, collocation, colligation and semantic prosody. Joy，anger，sad，fear，love，disgust and desire are human basic emotions. Emotion catharsis is a kind ofinstinctive reaction of human physiological state and human genetically predeterminedexpressions. Emotions are not the same as languages, but languages can be best meansto study human emotions. Emotive intensifiers are a sort of explicit emotionsexpressions which human emotions are encoded in languages. Understanding formationand features of emotive intensifiers are significantly important to deeply understandhuman emotions’ origins, the relationship between emotions and genres as well asemotive languages usage.This thesis takes “-ly” emotive intensifiers for examples, uses Corpus ofContemporary American English (COCA) as corpus source, is based on classificationsof Ekman’ six basic emotions (1992), and adopts case study, genre analysis combinedquantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The study tries to answer the followingquestions:1. What are the overall frequency of “–ly” emotive intensifiers at COCA?2.What are the genres distribution of “–ly” emotive intensifiers at COCA?3. What are themajor features of top ten “–ly” emotive intensifiers in terms of frequency, genredistribution, colligations and semantic prosodies at COCA?The results show that:One, the overall highest frequency of “-ly” emotive intensifiers shows that thehighest usage is surprise emotive intensifiers; the least usage are anger emotiveintensifiers and fear emotive intensifiers. Two, in terms of genres distribution, the highest usage of “-ly” emotive intensifiersis fiction genre, the least usage is newspaper genre.Three, case studies of top ten “-ly” emotive intensifiers show the following results:1. In terms of frequencies, the highest usage is surprise emotive intensifiers, theleast usage are fear emotive intensifiers, anger emotive intensifiers and disgust emotiveintensifiers.2. In terms of genres, the highest usage is fiction genre, and the least usage isspoken genre, academic genre and newspaper genre. These results in case studybasically accord with the results of overall “-ly” emotive intensifiers.3. In terms of colligations, the highest usage is colligation adverbs+verbs, next isadverbs+adjectives, the least usage is adverbs+adverbs.4. In terms of semantic prosodies, adjectives tending to collocate with top ten “-ly”emotive intensifiers are negatives more than positives. Besides, the higest usage genreshowed semantic prosodies is magazine genre and the lowest usage is academic genre.In brief, studying “-ly” emotive intensifiers has great significance in theory andpractice. On the one hand, theoretically not only does it enrich subjectivity andsubjectivisation, but it also broadens genres’ study scope from the perspective ofemotions. On the other hand, practically not only does it help teach, learn and identifywords of emotive intensifiers, and improve EQ, but it also initiates the study betweengenres and emotions. What’s more, it is significant important to get to know humanemotions’origins and emotive languages usage.