(II)The corpus-based studies of adjectives abroad

Except for the corpus-based BP studies on verbs, there have been a few on adjectives abroad recently (Gries 2001; Gries & Otani 2010)。 

Biber and Conard (1998) focused on the register distributions (e。g。 the academic and fiction) of the  synonymous adjectives great, large and big, which differ in intensity, and yielded that large is used more frequently in academic writing, while great is more common in fiction。 Besides the stylistic variations, researchers paid more attention to internal semantic distributions of synonymous adjectives。

In order to identify the semantic differences of adjectives, Gries (2001) proposed an innovative study of pairs of adjectives suffixed with –ic and –ical (e。g。 magic/magical)。 He examines the collocation patterns of the paired adjectives (mainly their modified nouns) and compared the semantic similarity and difference in each pair through the Estimation of Significant Collocate Overlap (ESCO) method。

For annotating a more internal semantic structure, Gries & Otani (2010) conducted a more complicated corpus-based BP study of two sets of the synonymous and antonymous adjectives (big, great, and large; little, small, and tiny)。 And yielded a variety of syntactic features (e。g。 the function of adjective in the contexts) and semantic distributions (e。g。 the types of noun modified)。