In this presentation I report on a corpus study of the phenomenon whereby two, and sometimes three, adjectives of size are used together in prenominal position. The adjectives in question denote the basic notions of ‘bigness’ and ‘smallness’, and this use of more than one adjective can most easily be viewed as a way of emphasizing the quality being denoted. Examples are the fairly frequent ‘great big’ and ‘tiny little’, and the less frequent ‘big gigantic’, and ‘massive big’. This phraseological phenomenon is briefly described in Huddleston & Pullum (2002), where it is presented under the heading of ‘intensificatory tautology’. I am not familiar, however, with studies which describe it in any detail; notably, there is no reference in Bolinger’s very thorough account of ‘intensification’ (1972). In terms of the individual adjective combinations, just a few are used commonly enough to show up in frequency-based corpus analysis and lexicographical description. In order to document modern usage fairly fully, a list of basic ‘size’ words was drawn up, and the various resulting word combinations were then looked for individually in a number of corpora. The conference presentation reports on: (1) which ‘types’ were found; (2) corpus frequencies; (3) text types; (4) any tendencies of specific adjectives to be in first or second position; (5) the nature of the nouns that are modified. Specific comments are also made on cases where there is an intervening comma (e.g. ‘these big, massive sounds’), some examples of which are in predicative position.

Contiguous adjectives of size: 'great big', 'tiny little', and less frequent pairings and triplets

COFFEY, STEPHEN JAMES
2011-01-01

Abstract

In this presentation I report on a corpus study of the phenomenon whereby two, and sometimes three, adjectives of size are used together in prenominal position. The adjectives in question denote the basic notions of ‘bigness’ and ‘smallness’, and this use of more than one adjective can most easily be viewed as a way of emphasizing the quality being denoted. Examples are the fairly frequent ‘great big’ and ‘tiny little’, and the less frequent ‘big gigantic’, and ‘massive big’. This phraseological phenomenon is briefly described in Huddleston & Pullum (2002), where it is presented under the heading of ‘intensificatory tautology’. I am not familiar, however, with studies which describe it in any detail; notably, there is no reference in Bolinger’s very thorough account of ‘intensification’ (1972). In terms of the individual adjective combinations, just a few are used commonly enough to show up in frequency-based corpus analysis and lexicographical description. In order to document modern usage fairly fully, a list of basic ‘size’ words was drawn up, and the various resulting word combinations were then looked for individually in a number of corpora. The conference presentation reports on: (1) which ‘types’ were found; (2) corpus frequencies; (3) text types; (4) any tendencies of specific adjectives to be in first or second position; (5) the nature of the nouns that are modified. Specific comments are also made on cases where there is an intervening comma (e.g. ‘these big, massive sounds’), some examples of which are in predicative position.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11568/145297
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