CHAPTER 3 CORPUS ANALYSIS
3.2 Results of the Corpus Study
3.2.4 Comparison of ‘Pretty’ and ‘Charming’ in Different Genres in the COCA
3.2.4 Comparison of ‘Pretty’ and ‘Charming’ in Different Genres in the COCA In this section, the overall distribution of pretty and charming in different genres showed in the COCA will be presented firstly. Then, we would like to understand the performance of the noun collocates of pretty and charming in both fiction and spoken genres.
Distributions of the two adjectives in different genres. In order to understand the
two adjectives better, we then compared collocates of pretty and charming in different genres from the COCA. The corpus contains texts from five genres (i.e., fiction, magazine, newspaper, academic, and spoken). A scale of formality was established for these genres provided by the COCA. It begins from the most formal to the least formal genre: academic writing, newspaper, magazine, fiction, and spoken (Hoffmann, 2014).
The frequencies of the adjective form of pretty and charming in the COCA were 18,301 and 6,583 respectively. By paying attention to the distribution of the two adjectives in various genres, the frequencies of them were shown in Figure 3-1. Some similarities and differences will be demonstrated in this section.
Figure 3- 1 Frequencies (Per Million) of ‘Pretty’ and ‘Charming’ in Each Genre
All Spoken Fiction Magazine Newspaper Academic
pretty 31.68 31 77.7 29.01 18.71 4.25
charming 11.4 8.11 21.45 13.68 11.61 2.87
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Figure 3-1 shows that pretty was more frequently used by language users than charming in general. In other words, the overall frequency of pretty was about 2.78 times than charming in the COCA. From the comparisons, Figure 3-1 also indicates that both the adjectives had a more dominant role in the fictional discourse than the other four genres. However, pretty was far more frequently used in the fiction genre, accounting about 3.6 times higher than charming. In addition to the fiction genre, pretty was frequently used in the spoken and magazine, ranked as the second and the third place, respectively, in the overall frequency distribution. Whereas, for charming, it was less frequently used in the spoken genre (8.11 per million) and academic genre (2.87 per million).
Overall, both adjectives commonly appeared in the fictional genre; while the academic genre was the least frequent section in which the two adjectives are shown.
Specifically, from the overall frequency distribution of the two adjectives in the genres, both of them were more commonly used in informal register rather than formal register.
Then, to explore how noun collocates of pretty and charming performed in the most frequently used genre, we searched the collocates in fictional section in the COCA.
In this query, only the R1 noun collocates were chosen; that is, those nominal words which appears immediately to the right of the target words were selected.
Performance of noun collocates in fiction discourse. Table 3-14 indicates that
the overall frequencies of the R1 collocates of pretty and charming in fiction genre.
These collocates were arranged by descending score. The score is “a function of the ratio of the two words” (COCA). For example, in the case of penny, the ratio of [pretty/charming] (90 times as frequent) is 9.1 times the overall ratio of [pretty vs charming] (9.88) in the corpus. “When the competing word has a frequency of 0, it is set to .5, to avoid division by 0” (COCA). In addition, collocates with a ‘score’ less than 3 were excluded from the discussion in the study.
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Table 3-14 The Comparison of R1 Noun Collocates of the Two Adjectives in the Fictional Genre
From the result, one could see that both the adjectives were used to modify features of people regularly, such as mouth, eyes, face, legs, smile etc., (the underlined words in Table 3-14) what different was that language users were more likely to use pretty to describe females, such as woman, girl, and girls (the bolded words); while they tended to use charming to describe males such as man (the bolded words). In addition, a noun collocate belonging to one of physical appearances deserved special mention; that is, head. When head was collocated with pretty, its meaning seemed to be expanded and it can be shown in the examples below.
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(3-18)
(a) “You’re thinking the price isn’t fair, Fr[a]ulein? I can tell you that even Schwinns motorcycle is that price, and it isn’t half as sturdy as the Emblem. Or are you just using that pretty head of yours to calculate? He grinned, then added, “Maybe you like my company on this Saturday afternoon.”
(b) A: “You concerned about me? That's a switch, since I'm officially the one who gets to worry about everybody else. It's in my job description.”
B: “You can worry your pretty head off about whomever you want, my dear Clare, but I'm in charge of you.”
In example (3-18-a), the Fraulein, referring to “an unmarried German woman” Collins Dictionary), thought that the price wasn’t fair. The shopkeeper tried to convince her by comparing the capacity and price of another motorcycle. However, from the description of the shopkeeper’s facial expression (He grinned) and his speech, it seemed that the shopkeeper looked down on the woman. Here, head means ‘intelligence’. As for the example (b), it seemed to be related to the phrase don't worry your pretty little head and the phrase is used to “tell someone not to worry” (Cambridge Dictionary). In this example, the interlocutor B said to A that he will take care of her although she spends all her effort to worry about others. Overall, from the observation of the retrieved examples in the study, it was found that when head appeared immediately to the right of pretty, it did not refer to the forward most body part but referred to someone’s intelligence or the process of protecting someone.
Another interesting finding was that all the top three noun collocates of pretty; that is, penny, thing, and sight, were nouns related to objects rather than people. One of the reasons why these collocates had higher frequencies may be correlated with some uses of idiomatic expressions, such as pretty penny and not a pretty sight. Examples below
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show the use of the idioms.
(3-19)
(a) She had a Patagonia vest, L. L. Bean clogs, and a Nikon that was old enough and sturdy enough to fetch a pretty penny.
(b) By the time I got to the suite McNaught and McNulty shared, I found them stripped to the waist and drinking bottles of cold beer. It was not a pretty sight.
Tracing back to Old English, pretty has original senses of “cunning and tricky”. In the Middle English, the meaning had shifted to “manly, gallant,” and later moved to
“attractive, skillfully made,” to “beautiful in a slight way”. Until the late 15th century, pretty has a sense of “considerable” (American Heritage Dictionary; Dictionary. com) and it can be seen in the idiom of pretty penny. The phrase is used to describe “a considerable sum of money” (Collins’s Dictionary) demonstrated in example (3-19-a).
For the phrase not a pretty sight, it shows the sense of “attractive”. The phase can be used to say someone or something is not pleasant to look at, indicating visually unappealing or an unfortunate situation (Collins’s Dictionary) as shown in example (3-19-b).
In terms of the noun collocate—thing ranked as the second place in the comparison.
A total of 63 tokens of pretty thing were found in the fictional genre in the COCA. It was found that pretty thing was more frequently used to refer a human being (62.5% of all the instances) rather than a solid object. Furthermore, among these sentences, 85%
of them (i.e., 34 instances) focused on depicting females. From the observation of the concordance lines, it appears that when pretty thing was employed to describe females (example 3-20), the phrase tended to co-occur with the description of physical appearance, such as hair, eyes, mouth, etc.
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(3-20)
(a) She was a pretty thing, with fine golden hair and hazel eyes.
(b) She was a pretty thing, with her long eyelashes and candy-shaped mouth.
In summary, from the collocates of the pretty and charming found in the fiction genre, one thing in common was that both the adjectives were regularly used to describe features of human beings. Moreover, from the top three noun collocates of pretty (i.e., penny, thing, and sight), we found that some high frequency collocates may be related to idiomatic expressions and the idioms can show the development of the word sense.
As for pretty thing, it was more likely to describe the female’s physical appearances. In the next part, we want to investigate the differences between the two adjectives when they were used in fiction and spoken genre.
Comparison of noun collocates performed in spoken discourse. From Figure
3-1, it has been observed that both pretty and charming had a more prominent role in fictional discourse. However, when we looked at the spoken genre, pretty was more frequent than charming (i.e., 31 per million for pretty and 8.11 per million for charming).
To find out how the two adjectives differ when they appear in spoken genre, a comparison in terms of their noun collocates were conducted and the result was shown in Table 3-15. The Table shows that the noun collocates of both pretty and charming were quite similar in spoken genre, they frequently co-occurred with nouns related to person, such as girl, guy, man, and person.
Table 3- 15 The Comparison of R1 Noun Collocates of the Two Adjectives in the Spoken Genre Word 1 (W1): pretty (39.79) Word 2 (W2): charming (0.03)
Word W1 W2 W1/W2 Score Word W2 W1 W2/W1 Score 1 girl 75 0 150 3.8 1 guy 29 0 58 2,308.10 2 picture 62 0 124 3.1 2 man 21 1 21 835.7
3 person 15 2 7.5 298.5
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However, when looking deeper through the score of collocates, one can see that the scores of modified nouns of charming were much higher than pretty. This may suggest that charming had a higher tendency to modify nouns related to person compared to pretty in the spoken discourse.