Absolutely amplified : A corpus study of amplifiers, their usage and collocations in two different corpora

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate the usage and frequencies of amplifiers in the English language and whether there are differences in usage, collocations and in gender. The material used is the Swedish-English Corpus (SWENC), a collection of Swedish native speaking journalists writing in English, and the Corpus of American Soaps (SOAP), a collection of American soap opera scripts. The size of the two corpora is quite different and therefore the number of tokens varies largely, but by using normalization, the frequencies have been compared. The results show differences in frequency and collocations between the different corpora and the conclusion drawn from this study is that there in fact are some amplifier differences when it comes to gender and collocations.   KEYWORDS: adverbs, amplifiers, collocations, corpus-studies, gendered language, linguistics, normalization