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112 Jarmo Harri Jantunen
synonymous words. Moreover, Quirk et al. claim (1985:441–453) that there are
restrictions in the combinations of degree modifiers and grammatical classes.
For instance, giving the example The nail went right through the wall they
note that the number of intensifiers (here right) that can precede prepositional
phrases (through the wall) is limited (ibid. 449). Degree modifiers can also be
collocationally restricted, which is examined by Altenberg (1991) who states,
for example, that many amplifiers tend to co-occur with words having a certain
meaning (e.g. utterly co-occurs with words with negative sense). In line with
Altenberg, also Bäcklund (1973), Paradis (1997) and Klein (1998) have found
the same kind of colligational, collocational and semantic restrictions in the
usage of degree modifiers in English and Dutch as well as in German. In
Finnish, a comprehensive analysis of contextual restrictions of degree modifiers
is lacking for the time being, although some efforts towards the description
have been made (see Orpana 1988; Jantunen 2001c; Jantunen & Eskola 2002).
In spite of the lack of thorough studies, however, we can expect that Finnish
degree modifiers are correspondingly contextually restricted. Furthermore,
degree modifiers are relatively frequent items and are used in texts regardless
of the topic because they, at least the grammaticalized modifiers, are closer
to function words than to content words (see Klein 1998:27–28). Finally,
degree modifiers do not typically vary in form, which, because FCCF is an
unlemmatised corpus, makes the analysis straightforward.
Of the degree modifiers, boosters (i.e. modifiers that scale upwards from an
assumed norm denoting a high but not extreme degree) are perhaps used most
frequently, at least in English. This can be seen, for example, by comparing
Tables 2.2–2.6 in Paradis (1997), and can partly be explained on the basis
of exceptionally frequent use of the booster very (ibid. 34; see also Bäcklund
1973:158). 12 According to A Frequency Dictionary of Finnish (Saukkonen et
al. 1979), boosters are used frequently also in Finnish: of all degree modifiers
booster hyvin (‘very’) is the commonest. Therefore, boosters – particularly the
items hyvin, kovin and oikein, which are the commonest boosters in FCCF –
are chosen for closer examination. The distribution of hyvin, kovin and oikein
in FCCF is displayed in Table 2.
The frequency list shows that in every subcorpus of FCCF, the most frequent
booster is hyvin, followed by kovin and oikein. 13 The rank frequency order
is similar in every subcorpus, which indicates, firstly, that translated Finnish
does not differ from non-translated Finnish in this respect, and secondly, that
translations from English (MoCTF) do not differ from general translational
language (MuCTF), either. It is, however, easy to see, that translations tend
to differ from non-translations in another way. The total number of the de-