Phraseological patterns of English adjectives and nouns: with reference to the noun collocates of new, good, old and high in American English

Abstract

This paper explores a corpus-driven approach to studying the phraseological patterns of adjectives and nouns using data and methods from corpus linguistics. The rationale behind this approach is the strong resonance between how the meanings of adjectives have been defined and a major claim proposed in corpus linguistics; the meaning of a lexical item is typically defined both by its inherent lexical content and its relation to any accompanying words. For the analysis, the four most frequent English adjectives and their most recurrent noun collocates were chosen from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (coca.byu.edu/coca). The data are new/book, good/news, old/friend and high/levels. The occurrences of the six different phraseological patterns of each pair were counted and the internal structures of each pattern were examined. Then, the concordance lines containing the two words were analyzed to determine how the words are related semantically and structurally. The analysis reveals that the noun phrase consisting of an adjective and its noun collocate is the canonical form throughout the four collocations. The analysis also finds that the four adjectives differ in terms of their phraseological patterning with the noun collocates. The adjectives new and old are rarely used as predicates when they are selected after friend and book, respectively. On the other hand, good and high are canonically employed to serve the predicative function when they follow news and levels, respectively. The two groups also differ from each other in the way they contrast with their antonyms. The adjectives high and good are frequently employed in a contrastive context with their antonyms low and bad, whereas the adjectives new and old are seldom employed in that way.