This paper is a corpus-based study on the maximizers absolutely, utterly, perfectly, extremely, thoroughly, fully totally, entirely and completely. These maximizers are described as ‘synonymous’ in most English dictionaries. Even though their lexi...
This paper is a corpus-based study on the maximizers absolutely, utterly, perfectly, extremely, thoroughly, fully totally, entirely and completely. These maximizers are described as ‘synonymous’ in most English dictionaries. Even though their lexical meanings and syntactic patterns are similar, their collocational patterns are not exactly the same. For this reason, the purpose of this study is to find out how those English maximizers tend to collocate with particular words. Based on the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the collocational patterns of the maximizers were investigated. The results of this study reveal that nine maximizers collocate strongly with particular words.