CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION
5.1 Major Findings in the Present Study
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CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION
There are two main foci of the thesis: the issues of (a) how to distinguish the differences and similarities of the two synonymous adjectives—pretty and charming, and (b) how EFL learners acquire them. This chapter is divided into two sections. Firstly, we would like to give a summary of the major findings in this thesis in section 5.1.
Then, in section 5.2, there will be some teaching suggestions for learning the set of near-synonyms—pretty and charming.
5.1 Major Findings in the Present Study
From the literature, the difficulty of the lexical choice between near-synonyms has been seen as one of the commonest language learning problems. Studies have tried to differentiate the differences between sets of near-synonyms through semantic roles of the words, collocational information, syntactic structure as well as their different performance in varied registers. Thus, in this thesis, we investigated all these information of the pair of near synonym—pretty and charming from the COCA. In order to explore the language learner’s use of the two adjectives, a psycholinguistic judgment task was adopted in the study as well. Additionally, we focused on the relation between gender and language for the reason that language use may reflect one’s social expectation or attitude toward different genders. Gender was used as a monitor variable in the psycholinguistic task to find out whether it would affect their language use. This integrated approach is different from those related studies because previous studies seemed to only focus on either the language use of native speakers or language learners.
In this section, the major findings of the thesis will be summarized.
First, regarding the semantic analysis of pretty and charming from the corpus, the results showed that both the adjectives had a similar tendency to describe the
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attractiveness of a person or a thing. Both of them were more likely to describe person-related nouns compared to object-person-related nouns. The main differences between them were types of attractiveness they modified. For modifying a person, pretty tended to describe someone’s outer beauty; whereas, charming in most cases indicated someone having an attractive character. In terms of modifying an object, pretty tended to depict something created by people (i.e., ‘artifact’), such as dress, table, etc., followed by modifying the natural beauty (‘nature’), such as flower, tree, etc. Whereas, charming was mainly used to describe the attractiveness of an ‘artifact’ and a ‘place’, accounting for about 79% of the total instances. Furthermore, the use of the two adjectives seemed to correspond to the social expectation of females. Females were more likely to be pretty;
they were attractive in a delicate way (be slight, fragile, airy, and have beauty). Thus, from the semantic analysis of the pair of near-synonyms, we could know that the differences between pretty and charming could be identified from their preferences of describing varied types of attractiveness. Moreover, regarding the relation between the use of the two adjectives and gender, pretty tended to describe female’s outer beauty;
while, charming preferred to describe male’s inner beauty.
Second, although from the semantic analysis, few instances were found that males were pretty. According to the collocational information of person-related nouns, boy and boys were strong collocates with pretty. The results indicated that not only the sex roles but also the age of the modified person may be related to the discourse functions of pretty. Pretty can be used to express both compliment and insult. For charming woman (woman was one of overlapped noun collocates of the two target words within the top 20), we found that charming can be used to describe the woman’s attractiveness in both outer beauty and inner beauty. In terms of collocational analysis of object-related nouns, the results were in line with those in semantic analysis—pretty tended to describe outer beauty (e.g., pretty dress, pretty clothes); charming was apt to describe
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inner beauty (e.g., charming book, charming town). Thus, from the collocational analysis, one could know that although the two adjectives had their own preferences to describe a particular gender of person (pretty for females; charming for males), they can be used to describe the two genders with both positive and negative discourse functions. In addition, since the two adjectives had a distinct preference for describing different sources of beauty (i.e., inner beauty and outer beauty), pretty tended to describe the outer beauty of a person or an object and charming preferred to describe the inner beauty, it seems that identifying the source of beauty of the modified nouns can be an effective way to differentiate the use of the two near-synonyms.
Third, from the investigation of the syntactic roles of the two adjectives, we found that both pretty and charming were more likely to appear in the attributive position.
However, what makes them different was the syntactic position which they applied when describing different categories of modified nouns. When describing person-related nouns, pretty did not show its preferences of syntactic positions (about 49% for both attributive and predicative position); whereas, charming showed a slight tendency to appear in predicative position (accounting about 57%). On the other hand, when modifying object-related nouns, both pretty and charming more frequently took the attributive position (about 55% for pretty and 69% for charming) than the predicative position.
Fourth, among the five registers showed in the corpus, pretty and charming commonly appeared in the fictional register. Their use in the academy register was the least. From the analysis, we could know the two adjectives were more likely to show in informal registers.
Fifth, following the findings in the corpus, we intended to explore what factors might influence EFL learners’ use of pretty and charming through a psycholinguistic judgment task. Three controlled variables were used to design the questionnaire; that is,
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(a) the ‘gender’ of a person who has the qualities being described in the sentences (b)
‘patterns’ of collocates (i.e., pretty-only, charming-only, and common), and (c) ‘source of beauty’ (i.e., inner beauty and outer beauty). In addition, the combinations of the participant’s gender and person’s gender were labelled as a monitor variable in the analysis. Some results of psycholinguistic judgement task were in line with the corpus analysis. Firstly, when describing person-stimuli, charming was used significantly more frequently in describing someone’s inner beauty by the Taiwanese participants (i.e., Group A). Secondly, it seems that pretty and charming were regarded as interchangeable pair of adjectives to describe the attractiveness of ‘artifact’ by the participants in both Group A and Group B. The result was in agreement with corpus data since ‘artifact’ was the most commonly type of noun modified by the two target words. However, different from the corpus data, the combinations of genders were not a significant factor affecting the participant’s acceptability of the sentences. The language learners did not show a tendency of using the two adjective to describe male or female exclusively.
From the results, some possible dilemma of learning the set of near-synonyms were found and these findings may bring some teaching suggestions for the future.
Firstly, ‘patterns’ of collocates served as a significant factor affecting the participants’
use of the two adjectives. The sentences within the ‘pretty-only’ pattern were less acceptable for the most of the participants, with a mean score of 3.25. The results may suggest that the language learners in both Group A and Group B seemed to be uncertain about the use of collocates of pretty. Secondly, for describing the beauty of ‘nature’, the noun within ‘common’ pattern (i.e., pretty scenery, charming scenery) were less acceptable than the other two patterns. It appears that all the participants thought that pretty and charming were non-interchangeable in this context. Furthermore, the participants in Group A indicated that among the three patterns, pretty was the most
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suitable adjective to describe the beauty of ‘nature’. However, the participants in Group B held a contrasting opinion—they thought that charming was the most appropriate word for describing ‘nature’. The findings may show that the participants had different tendencies of using the two adjectives in terms of depicting the beauty of ‘nature’. From these findings, some implications for pedagogical practices could be generated. In the next section, we will present one of possible ways of designing language learning task to provide learners with opportunities to notice the gap between their own language use and the target language.