A Corpus–based study of amplifiers in Latvian EFL learners’ Writing

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the use of amplifiers in the writing of Latvian learners of English. The investigation is based on data from the LEFL (Latvian EFL Learner) corpus and the GiG (Growth in Grammar) corpus, allowing for a comparison between foreign–language (L2) and first–language (L1) English usage. The focus on amplifiers was motivated by a preliminary analysis, which revealed that adverbs of degree, more specifically amplifiers, produced the highest number of occurrences in the corpus. The most frequent amplifiers – really, very, and more – aligned with findings from previous studies, confirming their status as common modifiers. While adjectives were the most frequently modified items across both corpora, the native speaker data displayed a greater variety of modified words, whereas the learner corpus exhibited a broader range of amplifier. Furthermore, the study explored potential first–language (L1) influence on foreign–language (L2) usage; however, it was concluded that the dataset was too limited in size to draw definitive conclusions regarding this aspect. Keywords: adverbs of degree, amplifiers, corpus linguistics, Latvian EFL learners