Distinguishing Pretty and Charming: A corpus-based and psycholinguistic study

• Main Authors: Yu, Ya-Lan, 游雅嵐
• Other Authors: Chung, Siaw-Fong
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/378gpq

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 107 === One of the commonest lexical use problems in English learning context is related to near-synonyms. Many language learners rely on dictionaries to provide the denotational meaning of a lexical item but are less aware of the subtle differences embedded in contexts. The differences between near-synonyms are hard to identify and acquire for learners. The present thesis aims to analyze a pair of near synonymous adjectives, that is, pretty and charming, through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). In addition, in order to understand the learning difficulty of learners, a psycholinguistic judgment task (an acceptability judgment task) based on the corpus data was also conducted. The corpus analysis demonstrated the similarities and differences between the two adjectives from several perspectives. First, from the semantic analysis, pretty and charming shared a sense of ‘describing someone or something as pleasant or attractive’. Both males and females can be modified by the two adjectives. Moreover, in different language contexts, the two target words can be used to express negative and positive discourse functions. Second, for syntactic position and register, pretty and charming were more commonly shown in the attributive position, tended to pre-modify the head of a noun phrase, and in informal registers (e.g., spoken and fiction). Third, as for collocational information, the main differences between the two adjectives were as follows: pretty was found to mainly co-occur with the outer beauty of people and objects (e.g., face, dress); charming tended to describe one’s inner beauty which takes more time to experience or think (e.g., personality, book). Fourth, from the analysis of psycholinguistic judgment task, one could find that the patterns of collocates (i.e., pretty-only, charming-only, and common) may affect the participant’s judgment of the sentences. Among the three patterns, pretty-only gained the lowest degree of acceptability, which showed that the participants might be less familiar with the collocational use of the pretty-only pattern. Furthermore, when describing an object, the participants seemed to be uncertain about the use of the two adjectives. Based on the results, we proposed that identifying the source of beauty of their modified nouns could distinguish the uses among pretty and charming. The difference could also provide a possible reason for the difficulty of near-synonym acquisition. This thesis attempts to unveil the difficulties of learning a pair of near synonymous adjectives from the integrated corpus-based and empirical findings. The findings can be applied to the design of English teaching techniques and materials and may be regarded as the basis of analyzing synonymous adjectives in future studies.