A corpus-based semantic prosodic analysis of English intensifiers in native and non-native corpora with a special focus to their usage patterns and evaluative meanings

Abstract

The primary purpose of the present study is to investigate semantic prosodic nature of intensifiers used by both native speakers of English and Turkish students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in their expository and argumentative essays along with a special focus on their overall distribution and usage patterns. Intensifiers are degree adverbials modifying attitudinal or evaluative meaning in written production. Semantic prosody, on the other hand, refers to a hidden meaning, either positive, negative or neutral, which is revealed when certain node words frequently collocate with other words from different semantic sets. The study mainly adopts the methodology of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis by Granger (1996) in nature. A comparative corpus research on the semantic prosodic analysis of intensifiers can simply and objectively be conducted with the help of special corpus tools in a computerized environment. In this regard, the study investigating the semantic prosodic analysis of ten target intensifiers (the maximizers absolutely, completely, entirely, fully, perfectly, totally, and utterly as well as the boosters very, so, and too) utilizes Sketch Engine as the concordancer to compare three distinct corpora; KTUCLE (Karadeniz Technical University Corpus of Learner English) together with TICLE for non-native corpora and LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) for native corpus.The local learner corpus of the study, KTUCLE, contains essays written by the students of a Turkish university called Karadeniz Technical University and consists of 709,749 words. The second learner corpora is TICLE, as Turkish sub-corpus of ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English), comprises 223,449 tokens in total. It is a collection of argumentative essays written by Turkish adult learners of English. The reference corpus called LOCNESS contains essays of native speakers and includes a total of 361,054 words. The results of the data analysis concludes that tertiary level EFL learners use rather limited range of maximizers such as completely and totally, and they have little semantic prosodic awareness about their usage. They predominantly prefer using boosters such as very which are open-ended in use and can be interchangeably used in all written discourse. This study is significant for revealing semantic prosodic behaviour of non-native EFL learners concerning intensifier use and providing pedagogical implications for phraseological skills in foreign language learning.