Semantic Categories of Haily and Jung (2015)

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adjectives tended to characterize the referent of nouns indirectly (e.g., an old friend of mine). From first inspection, one could know that both the target words in the study, pretty and charming, function predicatively and attributively. Still, this information is inadequate to distinguish the pair of near-synonyms. Other research indicated that analysis of semantic categories can also help to differentiate the differences between sets of near-synonyms. Thus, in the following section, Haily and Jung’s study (2015) will be elaborated. Their semantic categories in this study will be further adapted in the thesis.

2.3 Semantic Categories of Haily and Jung (2015)

Haily and Jung (2015) aimed to investigate the similarities and differences in the use of cute, pretty, and beautiful by using the Bank of English (BoE). The investigation focused on five language features of the target words: frequency, collocation, semantic preference, semantic prosody and phraseology of the adjectives. In this study, ‘semantic preference’ is “a type of semantic patterning where the node item collocates with words that are semantically related” (p. 127). For example, beautiful tends to collocate with words related to ‘structure’ (e.g. house, building). As for ‘semantic prosody’, it is a feature of a string of words concerned with communicative function (p. 127).¹

To explore similarities and differences in the use of the three adjectives, firstly, the researchers tried to identify the distribution of the adjectives in each sub corpus in the BoE. The results suggested that all three adjectives were more frequently found in the written corpora. These adjectives may be more frequently used in formal language than informal language. Secondly, a search of the strongest collocates in different word classes was conducted. Nouns were the strongest collocates of the three adjectives,        

1Although there is a dispute about the definitions of ‘semantic preference’ and ‘semantic prosody’, in this study, the authors adopted Sinclair (2004)’s descriptions of the two terms. In addition, in the present proposal, the author will adopt definition of semantic preference provided Sinclair (2004).

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followed by verb collocates. Thirdly, in order to find the semantic preferences of the three adjectives, the researchers classified the strongest R1 and R2 noun collocates into 10 categories, showed in the following table:

Table 2- 1 Haily and Jung’s (2015) Semantic Categories Categories Examples

People kid, kids, baby, babies, boy Body Part faces, face, bottoms, bum, butt Animal animal, animals, puppy, bear, horses Art comedy, picture, color, music, book Generality one, stuff, thing, things

Location town, village, place, south, country, city, Structure cottage, bedroom room house, home Clothing clothes, dress, dresses, patterns

Nature garden, flower, countryside, valley, scenery Other accent, doll, penny, game, voice

Note. From Haily and Jung (2015, p. 140)

It was found that there were some overlapped in the semantic preferences of the adjectives (see Table 2-2): they may have a similar preference for nouns related ‘people’,

‘body parts’ and ‘generality’. Moreover, cute seems to have the fewest semantic preferences since cute only frequently collocates with five semantic categories while pretty and beautiful have seven (p. 132).

Table 2- 2 Semantic Preferences of Cute, ‘Pretty’ and Beautiful Categories People Body

part Animal Art Generality Location Structure Clothing Nature Other

cute        

pretty        

beautiful        

Note. From Haily and Jung (2015, p. 132)

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In terms of semantic prosody, concerned with the communication function of a string of words (Sinclair, 2004, p. 34), a further investigation in concordance lines was conducted. It is suggested that although the three adjectives had a consistent discourse function of compliment the appearance of people and things, they also can serve different functions such as causing insult to males (e.g., pretty boy) or criticizing an act that is dishonest or dirty (e.g. cute trick) (p. 133). Regarding phraseology, the study examined the concordance lines in an attempt to find the patterns or phrases of the adjectives. It is reported that pretty and beautiful appeared to share similar patterns, for example, [ADJ to-inf] with ‘observation’ verbs such as behold, look at, and see. This pattern for both adjectives has a sense of ‘giving pleasure’ (p. 134). For instance, their hands are beautiful to watch (BoE). We can know that the viewer feels pleasure by watching (i.e., observation verb) in the sentence.

Overall, it is suggested that cute, pretty, and beautiful were not completely synonyms based on the analyses of five language features presented above, they may have different uses in different language contexts. The researchers also pointed out that the value of corpus linguistic research: is to help us clarify any uncertainties that language learners, language teacher or speakers may encounter about language use (p, 136).

In summary, from the review of some corpus-based studies, one could know that corpus can help us identify the language use of adjectives from several aspects:

collocation, syntax, and semantic, etc. However, within the field of gender and language, several studies have pointed out that language use could be correlated to a person’s social attitude and reflect social expectations toward different genders (Moon, 2014;

Baker, 2014; Crabb and Marciano, 2011). Therefore, in the next section, the relation between gender and language will be firstly introduced, and then a review of approaches to explore the relation between gender and language will be presented.

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