A Corpus-based Study on the Diachronic Change of Negative Emotive Intensifier in English--A Case Study of Dead

Abstract

In the English teaching, vocabulary learning has always been a focus. This study selected Brown corpus, Frown corpus and Crown corpus as corpus tools, employed quantitative and qualitative research methods, and took negative emotive intensifier dead as an example. The diachronic changes of this word in the past 60 years are analyzed from the perspectives of frequency, distribution, collocation and semantic prosody. The results indicate that the frequency, distribution, collocation and semantic prosody of dead have not changed significantly. However, dead collocating with verbs and adjectives used to play a positive reinforcement role shows an increasing trend.