A Study on the Usage Patterns of the Adverb-Adjective Collocations of the Synonyms for the Adverbs Marking Temporal Continuity in English
Hyunmi Hwang · The Journal of Linguistics Science · 2019
The aims of this study are to investigate the usage patterns of the synonym group of English adverbs marking temporal continuity from the British National Corpus Web, and to examine the semantic category and semantic prosody of the adjectives which are collocated with these adverbs. The results of the study are as follows: First, the result showed the highest frequency of the adverb constantly while that of persistently was the lowest. Comparing the frequency of the collocation for adverb+adjective, the adverb consistently is the highest and persistently is the lowest. Secondly, the adverbs continually and constantly had similar distribution of the semantic category and consistently and persistently are similar. Thirdly, considering the semantic prosody of the adjectives, the adverbs continually, consistently, and steadily are collocated with adjectives implying positive meanings, persistently with those implying negative meanings, and continuously and constantly are with those implying neutral meanings. It is expected that the results of the study can contribute to improving the collocation competence of learners and the learning strategies.