Patterns and Meanings of Intensifiers in Chinese Learner Corpora

Intensification plays a major role in spoken and written interaction, enabling the writer or speaker to express different levels of commitment. This book explores the patterns and meanings of intensifiers in Chinese learner English by ways of comparison with native English. The study adopts the method of contrastive inter-language analysis (CIA), and is conducted within the theoretical framework of Firthian contextual theory of meaning, Sinclairian model of Extended Units of Meaning (EUM) and Hunston's pattern grammar. This book is the first attempt to investigate the patterning and meaning features of intensifiers systematically with the corpora data in Chinese learner English. Readers will obtain a relatively complete picture of how Chinese learners use intensifiers to realize their attitudinal meanings.

Chunyan Wang is an associate professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests include data-driven learning, second language acquisition, language teaching and language testing.