Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
GlobELT 2025 Conference,, Batumi, Gürcistan, 25 Ekim - 29 Aralık 2025, ss.55, (Özet Bildiri)
Intensifier constructions are essential in construing evaluative meaning in academic writing, yet their gendered usage patterns in L2 learner texts remain underexplored. This raises questions about how writer gender shapes evaluative language choices. Drawing on the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), which spans essays from 26 L1 backgrounds (~6 million words), this study investigates whether gender influences preferences for intensifier-based constructions in argumentative prose.
Previous research has examined intensifiers in learner writing (e.g., Lorenz, 1999), but typically focuses on frequency or lexical range. Gender-linked variation in intensifier use has been documented in spoken L1 English, where women tend to use intensifiers more frequently and in different pragmatic contexts than men (Holmes, 1995). Using scripted but conversationally styled L1 dialogue, Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005) also found gendered preferences in intensifier selection. Theoretically, intensifiers are part of the graduation subsystem in Appraisal Theory (Martin, 2000; Martin & White, 2005), which models how writers scale evaluative meaning. Despite this relevance, gendered constructional preferences have not been examined through a corpus-driven approach. The study applies collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2003) to identify statistically salient associations between intensifiers and the lexical–grammatical elements they co-select. We compare these patterns across gender and L1 backgrounds without restricting the analysis to predefined pairings. This approach integrates gender-based sociolinguistic inquiry with large-scale learner corpus analysis to advance understanding of how gender mediates intensifier use in L2 academic writing.