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Due to their significance, amplifiers have been studied extensively, including the aspects of syntax, collocation, semantics and pragmatics, as well as language and social factors which may affect their use. Especially in recent decades, with the establishment of the modern English corpora, studies on amplifiers have been further developed. This paper will use the written English of Chinese College students as a pointcut to do some simple study.
2. Literature Review
2.1 The Definition of Amplifiers
Studies on amplifiers are extensive. Some of them consider amplifiers as a class to study, while others do specific studies on inpidual amplifiers. Different scholars give different definitions to this term. And the definition of amplifiers this article adopts is from Randolph Quirk (Quirk et al. 1985:590).
According to Quirk (Quirk et al., 1985:589), intensifiers constitute a gradable category. According to this widely-held view, intensifiers can be classified into the subcategories of amplifiers and downtoners, the former are often used to increase the meanings conveyed by relevant words, while the latter are often used to decrease the meanings conveyed.
Quirk (Quirk et al., 1985:589) then further classifies amplifiers into maximizers and boosters. “Amplifiers” can take up the function of “maximizers” when they indicate “an endpoint on a scale,” as pointed out by Biber et al. (Biber et al., 2007:210). This category of intensifiers includes “totally, absolutely, completely, and quite (in the sense of ‘completely’)” (Biber et al., 2007:210). The second subtype of“amplifiers” is called “boosters” and does not express an absolute degree, but simply enhances the quality of the modified adjective (Quirk et al. 1985:590).
Common amplifiers, within the two subclasses, include:
(a) maximizers
absolutely, altogether, completely, entirely, extremely, fully, perfectly, quite, thoroughly, totally, utterly, etc.
(b) boosters
badly, bitterly, deeply enormously, far, greatly, heartily, highly, intensely, much, severely, so strongly terribly, violently, well; a great deal, a good deal, a lot, by far, etc.
Amplifiers mostly refer to emphasizing adverbs. Syntactically, they are pided into two categories: 1) as a part of minor sentences, mainly to modify adjectives (e.g. very good), adverbs (e.g. perfectly well), and occasionally to modify qualifiers (e.g. completely no idea), pronouns (e.g. absolutely nothing) or prepositional phrases (e.g. completely in love); 2) as adverbials, to emphasize predicates or predicate components (e.g. partly agree) (Alternberg 1991).
A basic semantic difference between maximizers and boosters is their demands on the gradability of the intensified element. Since maximizers express an absolute degree, they are typically used to modify “non scalar” items, i.e. items that do not normally permit grading (e.g. empty, impossible, wrong) or already contain a notion of extreme or absolute degree (e.g. disgusting, exhausted, huge, marvelous, etc.). Boosters, on the other hand, typically modify “non scalar” items, i.e. items that are fully gradable. Although gradability is a complex phenomenon most clearly revealed by adjectives, it also applies to verbs.
2.2 The Researches on Amplifiers源-自-优尔:,论'文'网]www.youerw.com
In recent years, as a result of the rapid development of corpus linguistics, the studies on language by using retrieve tools has been further deepened, which include the in-depth studies on amplifiers. Using the native speakers’ essays in the International Corpus as a reference, Qi Jianxiao (Qi Jianxiao, 2006:48) investigated the use of amplifiers in essays of CET4 and CET6 in CLEC with the method of comparative analysis of interlanguage. The results showed that，on the whole Chinese learners overused amplifiers. And he found that Chinese learners underused maximizers (e.g. utterly, totally, absolutely), but overused boosters (e.g. very, really, very much). Wang Haihua and Chen Guohai (Wang Haihua & Chen Guohai, 2007:52) explored the features of collocations of amplifiers of three different groups of Chinese learners high school students, college non-English majors and college English majors. The results of their research showed that the use of maximizers of Chinese English learners was positively related to their overall level of language. English learners in the high school stage overused three “universal amplifiers”, i.e. “so”, “very” and “very much”. As far as the accuracy of using tokens and types in the collocations of boosters, the major differences existed between high school students and college non-English majors, and between college non-English majors and college English majors. Huang Ruihong （Huang Ruihong, 2007:57）used the data of CLEC and BNC to examine the features of adjective amplifiers used by Chinese language learners. She found that semantic prosody of Chinese students using adjective amplifiers is basically the same as that native speakers have, but students at different levels differ greatly in type, frequency and the scope of collocation of using amplifiers. Chen Ying and Ma Wulin (Chen Ying & Ma Wulin 2012:48) set ‘very much’ as an example to do a multi-dimensional investigation on the use of amplifiers in written language of Chinese learners of English. And they found learners were significantly different from native speakers in the frequency of use, register features, colligation, syntactic position, and semantic prosody of this target word.