Maximizers - completely complex adverbs : A corpus study of the maximizer usage in American and Swedish journalists' writing in English

• Main Author: Eriksson, Sanna
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) 2014
• Subjects: amplifiers; collocations; corpus-studies; intensifiers; linguistics; maximizers; second versus first language acqusition; semantic prosody; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-31589

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possible differences in the way American and Swedish journalists writing in English use maximizers, i.e. intensifying adverbs. In order to fulfill the purpose, information about how maximizers are used in two different sub-corpora, namely SWENC (The Swedish-English Corpus) and TIME (Time Corpus of American English) is collected. The data in SWENC has been collected from various websites where the crucial criterion was that the authors of the articles must have Swedish as their first language. The data from TIME has been collected from Time Magazine’s online corpora which is freely available on the Internet. The results show that there are some differences in the way Swedes and Americans use maximizers. The number of tokens for each maximizer does not differ to a great extent between the two corpora. However, there are larger deviances in the use of collocations and semantic prosody. The conclusion drawn from this is that there are indeed some differences in how American and Swedish journalists writing in English use maximizers, although they are not very many.