Abstract
Over the past four decades, the subject of collocations has received increasing attention in the field of applied linguistics (e.g. Sinclair, 1991; Wray, 2002). Many researchers have explored the studies on the use of collocations by learners (e.g. Durrant, 2008). In recent years, corpus-based studies examining the use of collocations by learners have shed light on the learners’ use of respective parts of speech and their collocations (e.g. Nesselhauf, 2003; Siyanova & Schmitt, 2008). To date, however, these earlier studies have not necessarily included the perspective of sociolinguistic variables, such as the register, gender, age, status, and ethnicity, of the participants of the reference corpus despite the importance of such factors as learners’ language variation depending on the social context they belong. Among these factors, this study focuses on the gender effect of Japanese learners’ use of amplifiers and their collocations, utilizing the NICT JLE Corpus (Izumi, Uchimoto, & Isahara, 2004), the spoken corpus of Japanese learners. The results indicate that the higher the level of the learners goes up, the more the number of amplifiers with significant differences across genders increases. The collocations including these amplifiers also demonstrated significant differences between genders.
