Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Semantic Analysis of "big" & "large"

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
In my opinion, the distinctive features are "+human and +quantity." But the latter has gradually changed these days.
And 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)

1 comment: