A Corpus-Based Semantic Study Of Dimensional Adjectives

Semantic preference and semantic prosody of the colligation comprising of dimensional adjectives and nouns are investigated under the current corpus-driven study. Previously, hinged on children?s acquisition mechanism, conceptual metaphor, vantage theoretical frameworks, syntax and semantic analyses have been strenuously examined. Besides, extensive consideration slants to discrepancies and overlapping existing cross languages. This paper analyzes the co-occurring words and contexts to excavate the habitual preferences and potential prosodic features.Taken from COCA, the working corpus(free-online corpus), raw data is sampled according to high Mutual Information Values and high frequencies as the top 30 collocated nouns. Subsequently, a concluding remark on the frequently occurring semantic preferences is ensued. Based on contextual analysis and lexical analysis, 10% sampling instances are to be investigated so as to uncover potential prosodic features.Ontologically, concrete and bounded content structures occupy a lot in the dimensional adjectives-nouns colligations, which is related to the phenomenon that dimensional adjectives play a fundamental role in constructing the world and that the properties of the world determine the selection of words. As for the abstract entities, dimensional adjectives slant to those entities with description based on dimensional adjectives? original meaning, such as time, measure, knowledge. Initially rooted in the objective preferences inclination, accordingly, from which a neutrally objective feature of prosody arises. From the extracted context fragments, there is an overall neutral prosodic feature in the dimensional colligation. Thereupon, both purely lexical analysis and discourse analysis exemplify a neutral objective preference and prosody in dimensional adjective and noun colligation. Collocational and corpus study are meaningful for L2 learners and interpreters.