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

1.1. Working definition of intensifiers

The term intensifiers is often used interchangeably with the terms like degree adverbs or degree modifiers, which are used to convey the degree or the exact value of the quality expressed by the item they modify. Quirk et al. (1985) defined intensifiers as “linguistic devices that boost the meaning of a property upwards from an assumed norm”. Bӓcklund (1973) gave a detailed descriptive characterization of degree adverbs in English and divided them into eight subclasses in terms of some notions of degree. According to Bӓcklund’s division, words like quite, pretty, rather and fairly belong to the class of moderate degree adverbs.

Though it is true that there are also some other alternative terms for the same groups of adverbs, the term like degree adverbs or intensifiers is suffice for the present study.

1.2. The definition and the thesaurus in the dictionary

According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), intensifier refers to “a word, usually an adverb, that is used to emphasize an adjective, adverb or verb, for example, the word ‘absolutely’ in the phrase ‘that’s absolutely wonderful’” (Pearson Education Limited 2003a).

LDOCE is also well distinguished from the other dictionaries in the synonymy columns, Thesaurus Columns. When looking up the four intensifiers, the thesaurus column writes,

“rather/quite   especially British English more than a little but less than very. British people use these words before adjectives in conversation. In many cases they do not intend to change the meaning. – It’s just something that people say: she seemed rather happy. It’s getting quite late.

fairly rather: fairly is used in both British and American English: The test was fairly easy./It’s a fairly long way to the next town.

pretty spoken rather. Pretty is more informal than the other words and is used in spoken English: His French is pretty good./We’re in a pretty strong position.” (Pearson Education Limited 2003b)

And in the entry of pretty, the dictionary gives the following notice:

“Register: In written English, people usually avoid pretty and use fairly instead.”

Thus, by referring to the thesaurus, three intensifiers like rather, quite, pretty are often preferred in British people’s conversation or spoken English, while fairly usually occurs in their written English. Then, the dictionary does not give more explanation for what’s the further difference among rather, quite and pretty. And another point needs to be mentioned: in the entry of fairly, one definition is “[+adj./adv] more than a little, but much less than very”, which is the same with rather and quite. Meanwhile, LDOCE also uses fairly to define rather, and rather to define fairly and pretty, which surely causes some misunderstanding to the non-native English learners.

2.1. Chinese learner corpora

The native Chinese students’ errors are surely inevitable in the process of acquiring a foreign language like English. What’s more, errors are a sound evidence of their language progress – interlanguage phase. Selinker (1985) coined the term “interlanguage”, implying that between the learner’s source language (first or native language) and target language (second or foreign language), there is an interlanguage, which shares the characteristic of two social dialects of the languages.

In China, there are two English learner corpora which should be taken into consideration while doing learner language competence analysis, CLEC and WECCL. Both are corpora of students’ written sample, but they vary in the tagging systems and research subjects. The combination of the two corpora makes it possible to obtain representative knowledge of Chinese students’ English competence.

2.2. The native English corpus BNC

The British National Corpus, abbreviated as BNC, is a large corpus which is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English, both spoken and written, from the late twentieth century. The written part of BNC includes extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodical and journal for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays.³ The written samples of school and university essays in BNC contain 204,009 words.

2.3. Methodology

Different corpora adopt different tagging systems. In BNC, intensifiers like quite, pretty, rather and fairly are tagged as AV0, while in WECCL, they are tagged differently, quite, pretty and rather as RG, fairly RR. As for CLEC, it is an error-tagged corpus, but not a grammatically tagged corpus, so the grammatical distinction has to be done manually.

In Table 1, the grammatical category of words like quite, fairly and rather is definite, while pretty can be used both an adjective and an adverb. In CLEC, there are only eight occurrences, which result in the alteration of pretty.

The three corpora vary in the amount of word collection, so if a comparison of raw counts cannot be used to conclude that a word is more common used than the others. In this case, the number of occurrences of a word should be converted to a standard scale, in this case per 100,000 words (Douglas, Conrad and Reppen 1998). When the counts are normed as in Table 2, pretty has 34.31 occurrences per 100,000 words in BNC, 11.63 occurrences in WECCL and 7.47 in CLEC.

3.1. Comparison of word list

Meara (1996, 3) notes that “learners with big vocabularies are more proficient in a wide range of language skills than learners with smaller vocabularies.”⁶ Laufer and Hill (2000, 44) state that “The level at which good first language readers can be expected to transfer their reading strategy to L2 is 3000 word families or about 5000 lexical items”. Researchers like Goulden, Nation and Read (1990), Laufer and Hill (2000, 44), Milton (2009), and Nation (2010) mention the minimum vocabulary of L1 or L2. Consequently, a threshold of 3000 word families is needed for minimum comprehension. LDOCE marks all the words that are in the Longman Communication 3000 in red accompanied by special symbols: W1, W2 and W3 for words that are in the top 1000, 2000 and 3000 most frequent words in written English, and S1, S2 S3 for the top 1000, 2000 and 3000 most frequent words in spoken English. What’s more, analysis of the Longman Corpus Network shows that 3000 most frequent words in spoken and written English account for 86% or more of what he or she reads. Then, a survey of word list is conducted into the three corpora to see their ranks in the word list, respectively.

Many researchers, like Nation (1990) and Laufer (1992), believe that EFL learners with a certain amount of high frequency English words can deal with reading task well. According to LDOCE, both quite and rather are marked as S1, W1, fairly S1, W2 and pretty S1, W3. From the comparison of word list in the three corpora in Table 3, it’s obvious to notice that quite and rather stand far prior to pretty and fairly. In LDOCE, both pretty and fairly belong to W2 for the native English students, W3 for the native Chinese students in CLEC, fairly W2 while pretty W3 in WECCL. This indicates that the native English students are likely to acquire the four intensifiers earlier than their Chinese peers. And the native Chinese students, ranging from senior high school students to college English majors, are prone to acquire quite and rather earlier than pretty and fairly as intensifiers, which is opposite to the native English students. However, the results of pretty and fairly retrieved from WECCL indicate that English majors are more likely to use fairly rather than pretty as an intensifier, which can also be proved in the frequency difference displayed in Table 2.

3.2. The distribution of the four intensifiers in CLEC and BNC

As for the distribution of the students’ use of the four words, a comparison is also made to see whether the students’ knowledge of the vocabulary vary between native English students and native Chinese students or vary with their proficiency in English. Here in the comparison, only two corpora are needed, one CLEC and the other BNC. For students of high school to a college student, their ages are varying within the range of 15–24. In CLEC, ST2–ST6 are written samples of students of 15–24 years old.

Figure 1 displays difference in the theoretical hits per million of the four words in the students’ writings. The native English students use quite more often than their Chinese peers. The Chinese native students underused each intensifier in their writings, fairly in particular. But the frequency pattern seems quite similar to each other: in both of their writings, quite is the most often used intensifiers and rather ranks the next. And compared with the native English students, the native Chinese learners greatly underuse both quite and fairly in their writing.

Figure 1.

Comparison of use of pretty, quite, rather, fairly in CLEC and BNC.

4.1. Comparison of quite and rather in CLEC and BNC

By looking closely at the syntactic structures of quite and rather into both BNC and CLEC, the difference in the output between the native English students and the native Chinese students can be shown in an objective way.

In BNC and CLEC, quite+NP includes quite (a/an) (adj.) noun, quite a few (of noun), quite a lot (of noun) and quite the +adj./noun. The cluster of quite a bit (of noun) does not appear in CLEC. And in both corpora, the highest frequency goes to quite or rather proceeding the adjective heads, quite+AP 304 in BNC (restricted to the Genre:W:essay:school or Univ) and 166 in CLEC, rather+AP 118 in BNC and 63 in CLEC. The data shown in Table 4 indicate that the native English students and the native Chinese student have the similar preference in using quite and rather, namely, using quite and rather to intensify their statement or description.

Except that, rather and quite are regarded synonyms, both in meaning and syntactically. The following table lists the immediate right adjective collocates of rather and quite in BNC and CLEC.

According to Table 5, the native English students and the native Chinese students tend to use quite and rather to modify different adjectives. Comparing with BNC, Chinese learners prefer to collocate quite with positive words like different,⁷good, happy, important etc. and use rather to modify negative words.

In the Longman dictionary, “the adjective collocates of quite from the entries:

obvious, content, distinct, exceptional, likely, normal, perfect, ridiculous, right, scared, shocked, sure, surprised, unaware, unnecessary, useless, expensive, similar, extraordinary, willing, cold, absurd, unlikely, unusual, simple, straightforward, clever

the adjective collocates of rather from the entries:

excessive, expensive, unlikely, unusual, relieved”.

Comparatively, quite is more often used as adjective modifiers than rather, seen in the two corpora and the entries in the dictionary. But according to the examples presented in the Longman dictionary, quite and rather do not differ in prosody, but in the degree of common use. Differing from quite, the word rather also often occur in the clusters like would rather do sth. (than do), rather than sth. etc. In CLEC, the students of higher grade tend to use “would rather”, “rather than” clusters more in their writing, which shows the similar preference as the native English students.

4.2. Comparison of pretty and fairly in CLEC and BNC

Different from quite and rather, pretty and fairly can only modify adjectives and adverbs. What’s more, non-native English educators usually distinguish pretty and fairly in terms of semantic prosody. Since Stubbs (2002) came up with the idea of semantic relations between node and collocates, namely, the collocational meaning or semantic prosody, researches on semantic prosody have been conducted. Partington (2004) made distinctions of semantics prosody like favourable, neutral and unfavourable, while Xiao and Mcenery (2006) use positive, neutral and negative semantic prosodies to analyse the near synonyms between Chinese and English.

And according to the Longman dictionary, “the adjective collocates of fairly from the corpus:

accurate, certain, clear, close, constant, easy, good, high, large, low, new, obvious, quiet, recent, regular, short, simple, small, stable, standard, strong, sure, typical

And the adjective collocates of pretty from the corpus:

bad, big, clear, close, good, hard, little, obvious, strong, sure, tough”.

From Table 6 and the Longman corpus, it’s hard to sense the semantic prosody difference between pretty and fairly as the non-English instructors usually mention in their instructions: fairly is the weakest intensifiers compared with pretty, quite and rather and it often co-occurs with positive words. In terms of intensifying degree, pretty or rather is stronger than quite, which is followed by fairly.

Native English students tend to use fairly more in their writing without distinguishing it as an intensifier modifying only positive words, while native Chinese students regard both equal to each other and tend to use it to modify positive words, like cheerful, optimistic etc. both fairly and pretty can be used in writing,