Chapter OneIntroduction
1.1 Research Background
Intensifiers contribute to successful communication because they can help enhancetones, express different degrees and feelings towards things, conducing to achievingintended communicative purposes and fulfilling harmonious interpersonal relationship.According to Peters (1994)，in order to be original，to demonstrate their verbal skills,and to capture the attention of their audiences, speakers often employ intensifiers incommunication.Being a subclass of intensifiers, maximizers such as completely, totally and fullyare frequently used to express speakers' attitudes or feelings. Maximizers denote theupper extreme of a scale; they can express the absolute extreme on the scale or convey avery high degree. Maximizers are often used by speakers in daily communication, forinstance: In the first example，absolutely expresses the speaker's certainty, in the secondsentence，extremely conveys the speaker's feeling; and in the last sentence，completelyshows the speaker's attitude.From the above examples, we can see that as a subtype of intensifiers, maximizersplay a significant role in communication for the reason that they help achieve successfulcommunication and fulfill harmonious interpersonal relationships.People's frequent use made intensifiers a hot topic for linguists, scholars andresearchers. With the aid of corpora, they carried out enormous studies on intensifiersfrom the perspectives of collocation, colligation，word frequency and semantic prosody.However, there were almost no researches which studied the distribution of intensifiersor just focused on maximizers. The present research, based on the data extracted fromthe British National Corpus (BNC)，aims to investigate the distribution features ofmaximizers.A corpus is a collection of authentic machine-readable texts and transcripts ofspoken data which is sampled to be representative of a particular language and whichcan serve as the basis for linguistic description and analysis. This study adopted thecorpus-based approach because it can ensure the reliability and objectivity of the results,making the study more convincing.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
Because of the function of expressing the speakers' feelings, emotions and attitudes,adverbial maximizers are frequently used by English native speakers. But how areadverbial maximizers used by them? To be specific, what are the distribution features ofthe adverbial maximizers in both written and spoken English? These questions remainunclear yet. Thus, the study proposed here, by analyzing data extracted from BNC, isintended to investigate their distribution, in order to deepen the understanding about theusage of the English adverbial maximizers.Analyzing the distribution information of maximizers is on the one hand of greattheoretical significance; and on the other hand can facilitate language teaching andlearning as well as enlighten dictionary compilers.Firstly, the current study can not only verify theories or ideas about varieties oflanguage, provide a new perspective for sociolinguistics but also can enrich the studiesof intensifiers, other types of words even other linguistic phenomena.Secondly, through the present research, we can have a better understanding of theEnglish adverbia maximixers，for instance, about their stylistic features, theirdistribution in different written text domains, and their usages between different gendersand among different age groups，etc.
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Chapter TwoLiterature Review
2.1 Theoretical Background: Varieties of Language
As a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies the relation between language and thesociety，between the uses of language and the social structure in which the users oflanguage live, sociolinguistics has always been studied by linguistics. According to thesociolinguists, sociolinguistics has two main concerns, they are: 1) social significance oflanguage variation and language use in different speech communities including regional，ethnic and social groups; 2) the impact of other social factors on language use，such asage, gender, profession, and social status etc. The American sociolinguist NessaWolfson (1983) once said that the scope of sociolinguistics is who says what to whom,when and how.The relationship between language and the society has always been a popular topicin sociolinguistics. Language and society influence each other. Language affects thesociety in that language can perform social functions; and the society influenceslanguage in that social factors such as age，gender, cultural differences influencelanguage use. Therefore, for one thing, language is a social phenomenon which plays anextremely vital role in the society; for another, the society exerts an enormous influenceon language as well. People's social class, social status，education background,occupation, gender，age, religion, and ethnicity etc. influence the way they use language,which results in language variation and varieties.
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2.2 Key Concepts
As is defined by Quirk et al. (1985)，adverbial maximizers are a group of words“which can denote the upper extreme scale，，(p.590). Maximizers are a subtype ofintensifiers which "are broadly concerned with the semantic category of DEGREE"(Quirk et al.，1985, p.589). Intensifiers include “amplifiers，，，the high end of the scale,and "downtoners", the relatively low point on that scale. Intensifiers can be furtherdivided into two groups, they are: "amplifiers" which include "maximizers" and"boosters" and "downtoners" which can be classified into "approximators",“compromisers”，"diminishers" and "minimizers". The subsets of intensifiers arepresented in the following figure. As is stated by Quirk et al. (1985)，the degree of maximizers differs in the middleand end position. When maximizers are in M position they often expresses a very highdegree, whereas when they are in E position they tend to convey the absolute meaningof extreme degree. For example, in the sentence “they completely deplore his project”，completely expresses a very high degree and means very much; while in the sentence“they paid for his damage fully", fully means to the greatest degree and expresses thehighest or absolute extreme.
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Chapter Three Research Question and Method...... 19
3.1 Research Question...... 19
3.2 Method ......20
3.3 Data Collection and Analysis...... 26
3.3.1 Mixed Methods Research...... 28
3.3.2 Data Sampling ......30
3.3.3 Distribution Analysis ...... 33
Chapter Four Results and Discussion...... 36
4.1 Results...... 36
4.2 Discussion...... 39
Chapter Five Conclusion ...... 42
5.1 Findings ......42
5.2 Implications...... 44
5.3 Limitations...... 45
Chapter FourResults and Discussion
4.1 Results
As a useful device to express attitudes, tones and feelings, maximizers frequentlyappear in both written and spoken English. But how are they used in written and spokenEnglish? In other words, what are their stylistic features? Are they more frequently usedin written or spoken English? With the aid of two native English written and spokensubcorpora, we can find answers to this question.Firstly，it is necessary to obtain the frequency information of the 10 maximizers inwritten subcorpus and spoken subcorpus respectively. Secondly, after all the frequencyinformation was retrieved，use the Log-Likelihood Calculator to analyze the distributionfeatures of maximizers, figuring out whether the selected maximziers are morefrequently used in written or spoken English.Search a maximizer, quite for instance, in written subcorpus and spoken subcorpus;in the top of the concordance page，we can see the hits of quite in written subcorpus.The hits here are the frequency of the word in written or spoken subcorpus. For example，the following two screenshots are the results returned from the written and spokensubcorpus separately.
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Conclusion
The present research studied the distribution of maximizers between spoken andwritten English, among written text domains, among different age groups, differentgenders and social classes. In this section，based on the research results obtained in theprevious chapter, the major findings of the present study are concluded respectively.Firstly, concerning the distribution of maximizers between spoken and writtenEnglish, the author found that most, fully，entirely, extremely, perfectly and altogetherare more used in written English while quite, completely, totally and absolutely are moreused in spoken English.Secondly, as to the distribution of maximizers among written text domains, theauthor found that quite，altogether，completely, absolutely and perfectly are more used inhumanistic works while most，entirely, fully，extremely and totally appear morefrequently in scientific works.Thirdly, with respects to the distribution of maximizers between different gendersof speakers, it can be concluded that most’ completely, fully, entirely extremely,perfectly，and altogether are more frequently used by male speakers while quite, totally’and absolutely are more preferred by female speakers.
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