코퍼스를 바탕으로 한 영어 diminisher의 분석과 대학생들의 인지도 연구

A corpus-based analysis of English diminishers and a study on college students' awareness of their usage

English intensifiers play an important role in conveying the mood or subtle meaning of utterances. While they are used in semantically and syntactically different environments, their different usage does not seem to be well perceived by EFL learners. The purpose of this study was two-fold: 1) to look more carefully at the distribution of intensifiers and their collocational and grammatical behaviors in a spoken and written corpus, and 2) to examine college students' awareness of the intensifiers, diminishers were chosen for the study because they have been neglected in the field, while previous studies focused mainly on amplifiers. The results of the corpus analysis showed that the distribution of each intensifier in the corpus was different in terms of frequency of occurrence and linguistic environment for use. On the other hand, the test of the students' knowledge on diminishers revealed that only about 30 percent of the students were aware of their usage. That is, the study suggests that although the diminishers have semantically and syntactically different features, students are not well aware of the differences and therefore use them inappropriately. Implications for teaching are also discussed.