ABSTRACT
Advanced learners are typically 'advanced' by virtue of having mastered the basic rules of syntax and morphology. The corpus searches have produced three sets of results, concerning the non-native/native differences in the actual inventories of adjective intensification, that is their lexical resources and their distribution across the four corpora, the individual non-native deviations, and several stylistic aspects of adjective intensification, as become apparent in the overall numerical patterns. If intensification were used to compensate for learners' lexical weaknesses on a systematic, numerically significant scale, then these weaknesses would have to be reflected in the non-native speakers (NNS) and native speaker (NS) adjective resources. Advanced German learners of English have been found to overuse the lexico-grammatical function of adjective intensification. This overuse does not seem to be derived from a fundamentally different understanding of the function as a whole, from a cultural propensity for overstatement, or from a lack of lexical differentiation in the learner language.
