CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION
6.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Studies
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will be discussed.
6.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Studies
In this thesis, an integrated approach including both corpus analysis and a psycholinguistic judgement task was adopted. However, some limitations exist in these two approaches and they will be discussed in this section for improving the designs of research methods in related studies in the future.
First, for the scope of corpus analysis, we only focused on the adjective form of pretty and charming. Within the set of near-synonyms, the adjectives can be used to describe an attractiveness of a person or a thing. However, we expect that future studies can broaden the research scope within other adjectives, such as lovely, beautiful, and nice. The comparison between these adjectives may provide a whole picture of this group of near-synonyms.
Second, as for the different behaviors of the two adjectives shown in the corpus data, we focused on several aspects to explore their differences, such as semantic, collocation, syntactic role, and register. In the thesis, we also found some instances showing that both adjectives had both positive and negative meanings. However, some aspects could be further investigated to demonstrate the discourse functions of the target words. For future studies, the researchers could investigate the adjectives from metaphors or meaning extensions.
Third, concerning the design of psycholinguistic judgment task, the collocates within three ‘patterns’ (i.e., pretty-only, charming-only, and common) were taken from the Sketch Engine. It provides the information about the grammatical behavior of the two lemmas and shows what patterns they share or are more typical of. However, the information provided by Sketch Engine was derived from the British National Corpus (BNC), which mainly represent British English. There may be some subtle different preferences in collocational use between British English and American English since
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the COCA was adopted as the source data in this thesis, which mainly focused on American English. In future studies, a further comparison of collocational use between British and American English could be undertaken before the design of the psycholinguistic judgement task.
Fourth, with respect to the psycholinguistic judgement task, the number of female and male participants in the study was unequal because of the difficulties of finding participants for the research. One of possible reasons of the imbalanced gender ratio in the study was related to the participant’s major subject. Most of the participants majoring in either Education or English and were females. In this circumstance, it may be hard to explore whether different genders would have different preferences in using pretty and charming. In future studies, online survey may serve as a tool to gather data automatically and reduce the difficulties of accessing individuals. The participants can complete the task at any time and place. Although online survey was convenient to conduct research, we should be aware of some disadvantages as well.
In sum, the thesis presented a corpus-based research method with quantitative approach to identify the differences between the two near-synonymous adjectives—
pretty and charming. This approach has proposed a clearer description of the two adjectives’ preferences for types of modified nouns, syntactic position along with registers. The language use of learners has also been discussed so as to find out their difficulties of acquisition and provide some pedagogical implications for learning near-synonymous adjectives. Based on the work of this thesis, the results could be utilized to further investigating other sets of near-synonymous adjectives. The limitations could provide some suggestions for the design of methods for future study. In addition, some insights into designs of language learning materials and the ways of teaching can be offered by the thesis.
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Dictionary
Charming. (n.d.). Collins’ COBUILD Advanced Learning English Dictionary.
Retrieved from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/charming.
Charming.(n.d.). Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved from https:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charming.
Charming.(n.d.). Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/charming.
Pretty.(n.d.). Collins’ COBUILD Advanced Learning English Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/pretty.
Pretty.(n.d.). Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pretty.
Pretty.(n.d.). Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/pretty.
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APPENDIX ONE Questionnaire A Dear participant:
I am a graduate student majoring in TESOL program at National Chengchi University. The aim of this questionnaire is to understand your uses of English. This is not a language test and it has nothing to do with your grades and scores. Please answer the following questions as honestly as possible. The collected data will be used only for academic analysis. Thank you very much.
Department of English National Chengchi University Advisor: Dr. Siaw-Fong Chung Student: Ya-Lan Yu Part A: Background Information
Part B:
Instruction: There are sixteen questions in total. Please read each sentence carefully and circle the acceptability rating of each sentence. 1 means a sentence is ‘totally unacceptable’ to you and 5 means it is ‘perfectly acceptable’ to you.
1. English Name: ( ) 2. Gender: Male Female
3. Nationality: ( ) 4. Native language: ( )
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The end of the questionnaire. Thank you very much!
Questions Totally
Unacceptable Unacceptable Neutral
Perfectly acceptable
Perfectly acceptable
(1) Sandy couldn't deny she had been attracted to his charming smile. 1 2 3 4 5
(2) Let yourself be attracted by the charming nature and extraordinary landscapes. 1 2 3 4 5
(3) It's his extreme good fortune that he can use his charming voice to earn a living. 1 2 3 4 5
(4) We took the railway for a closer view of the pretty harbor. 1 2 3 4 5
(5) The charming inn incorporates the natural beauty of Canada through its architecture. 1 2 3 4 5
(6) She has a charming manner and she always likes to make jokes about herself. 1 2 3 4 5
(7) She imagined that waking up to the charming scenery of the beach. 1 2 3 4 5
(8) It is a pretty story about the country life of a girl with a cat. 1 2 3 4 5
(9) She likes to make pretty flower arrangements with lots of colors. 1 2 3 4 5
(10) I like the idea of you shooting the pretty scenery of beach. 1 2 3 4 5
(11) That was another of his charming traits. He was never to blame for anything. 1 2 3 4 5
(12) She is using that pretty head of her to calculate which product is better. 1 2 3 4 5
(13) She always uses that pretty voice to say ‘Good morning’ to everyone. 1 2 3 4 5
(14) This charming story is drawn from the true adventures of the author. 1 2 3 4 5
(15) This woman has many pretty traits. She was willing to admit her mistakes. 1 2 3 4 5
(16) John sat there imagining all the pretty clothes he would have when he went to the party. 1 2 3 4 5
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APPENDIX TWO Questionnaire B Dear participant:
I am a graduate student majoring in TESOL program at National Chengchi University. The aim of this questionnaire is to understand your uses of English. This is not a language test and it has nothing to do with your grades and scores. Please answer the following questions as honestly as possible. The collected data will be used only for academic analysis. Thank you very much.
Department of English, National Chengchi University Advisor: Dr. Siaw-Fong Chung Student: Ya-Lan Yu Part A: Background Information
Part B:
Instruction: There are sixteen questions in total. Please read each sentence carefully and circle the acceptability rating of each sentence. 1 means a sentence is ‘totally unacceptable’ to you and 5 means it is ‘perfectly acceptable’ to you.
1. English Name: ( ) 2. Gender: Male Female
3. Nationality: ( ) 4. Native language: ( )
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The end of the questionnaire. Thank you very much!
Questions Totally
Unacceptable Unacceptable Neutral
Perfectly acceptable
Perfectly acceptable
(1) She lowered her window and gave the man her most charming smile. 1 2 3 4 5
(2) He has a charming manner and he always likes to make jokes about himself. 1 2 3 4 5
(3) It is a pretty story about the country life of a girl with a cat. 1 2 3 4 5
(4) This charming story is drawn from the true adventures of the author. 1 2 3 4 5
(5) She likes to make pretty flower arrangements with lots of colors. 1 2 3 4 5
(6) That was another of her charming traits. She was never to blame for anything. 1 2 3 4 5
(7) I like the idea of you shooting the pretty scenery of beach. 1 2 3 4 5
(8) Judy sat there imaging all the pretty clothes she would have when she went to the party. 1 2 3 4 5
(9) This man has many pretty traits. He was willing to admit his mistakes. 1 2 3 4 5
(10) He always uses that pretty voice to say ‘Good morning’ to everyone. 1 2 3 4 5
(11) Let yourself be attracted by the charming nature and extraordinary landscapes. 1 2 3 4 5
(12) It's her extreme good fortune that she can use her charming voice to earn a living. 1 2 3 4 5
(13) We took the railway for a closer view of the pretty harbor. 1 2 3 4 5
(14) The charming inn incorporates the natural beauty of Canada through its architecture. 1 2 3 4 5
(15) She imagined that waking up to the charming scenery of the beach. 1 2 3 4 5
(16) He is using that pretty head of his to calculate which product is better. 1 2 3 4 5