| The extended units of meaning,including five elements of node word,collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody,can reflect the semantic and pragmatic features of words,so as to make a comprehensive and systematic description of collocation features.In the past twenty years,many scholars both at home and abroad have carried out a large number of researches on semantic preference and semantic prosody of different words,especially on intensifiers.However,a language is changing all the time,there is little research on the diachronic analysis of intensifiers based on the extended units of meaning.Therefore,this thesis chooses eight maximizers and five boosters which have been put forward by Kennedy in 2003 as the research objects,aiming to explore the diachronic changes of frequency,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody,as well as the diachronic changes in different genres.The research questions in this thesis include:1.What are the diachronic changes of the eight maximizers based on the extended units of meaning including colligation,collocation,semantic preference and semantic prosody?2.What are the diachronic changes of the five boosters based on the extended units of meaning including colligation,collocation,semantic preference and semantic prosody?3.What are the diachronic changes of these intensifiers in different genres?This thesis adopts a qualitative and quantitative method to search and analyze the thirteen intensifiers by use of software.The data are collected from the Corpus of Historical American English(COHA)and the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA).At first,with the help of AntConc 3.4.3,the total frequency of each intensifier is counted and the change features are summarized respectively.Then,all the data are tagged in Tree Tagger 3,and the regular expression of different colligations are edited,so that the colligation change are concluded with the help of AntConc 3.4.3.At last,the diachronic changes of the semantic preference and semantic prosody are observed and summarized.The results of this thesis show that,(1)as to maximizers,the colligation remains relatively stable while the frequency has changed significantly.In specific,completely and totally keep growing constantly,while the other maximizers are decreasing gradually.In terms of semantic preference and semantic prosody,obvious changes on adjectives have taken place after 1960 s.For example,more adjectives describing social development collocates with fully,and the neutral semantic prosody takes up more;completely has become the most popular intensifier for the wider semantic preference,while thoroughly and utterly are used least gradually for the stable and narrow semantic preference,indicating that semantic convergence may be the possible factor leading to the frequency change;the collocates with absolutely,totally and utterly become more simple and the positive semantic prosody takes up more,reflecting their colloquial trend;(2)as to boosters,greatly is used less while the other boosters are used more frequently.The change in terms of semantic preference of boosters is more simple and stable than maximizers.In detail,more formal adjectives describing the social development tend to collocate with greatly,heavily and highly and the neutral semantic prosody takes up more,reflecting that social change may be the possible reason for the change of semantic preference.In addition,there is no change of extremely and terribly.(3)The frequency of maximizers in fiction has a close relationship with semantic prosody,if the positive or negative semantic prosody takes up more,the maximizer will be used more in fiction,such as absolutely,completely,totally.In addition,the frequency of boosters except greatly in fiction and newspaper keeps relatively stable.This thesis still has some limitations,but it can be helpful to better understand the diachronic features of intensifiers in American written English,and thus can offer some reference to use different intensifiers more properly. |
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