Semantic Analysis of "big" & "large"

As foreign learners, we are sometimes confused by synonyms.

Today let's take a quick look at two synonyms, "big" & "large".

big: large in size or amount( from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary) / large in size, degree, amount, etc (from Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary )

large: big in size or amount (from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary) / big in size or quantity (from Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

Well, there's no evident distinction between "big" and "large" from the two dictionaries. Now here comes the concordancer.

After searching the corpora, the lexical entries for "big" & "large" would appear as follows:

big: +concrete +abstract +size +degree +animate (+quantity) +fame large: +concrete +abstract +size +degree +animate +quantity

The analysis shows no evidence that "large" could only be used to describe abstract things or "big" to describe concrete things. In my opinion, the distinctive features are "+human and +quantity." And the latter has gradually changed these days.

In conclusion, there's surely a rule governing the usage of "big" & "large" More often than not, the modern usage in "large" tends to describe a object possessing "number/quatity" features, such as large amount. But I also find out that the difference between the two words is not that clear in spoken forms. In some spoken corpora, big sometimes is used to describe "amount/ number." However, the most distinctive feature between the two words is "+fame." Big is used to describe a man or the nouns relating to it more often than large. The examples are as follows:

Mr. Big :to represent the man is really someting.

Mr. Large in Charge (a book character): to represent a big size body.

a big name (a well-known name)

*a large name (not found)