Corpus-based comparative study of intensifiers: quite, pretty, rather and fairly

Abstract

The study of intensifiers has been of interest both in semantics and sociolinguistics. But as for how the intensifiers used by second-language or foreign-language learners of English, there are far fewer corpus-based researches partly owing to the potential difficulty in compiling a corpus and suitable data-analysing software. The present study examines four general intensifiers like quite, pretty, rather, fairly in the British National Corpus, the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learner and the Chinese Learner English Corpus, comparing the practical use as well as the semantic prosody of the four intensifiers between native speakers and English learners, and found that native speakers and learners showed different preference in use and have different understanding of the intensifiers in question.