형용사 Lovely와 Cute의 사용에 대한 코퍼스 기반 연구

This paper is a corpus-based study of the difference . in use between lovely and cute through COCA. There have been some corpus-based studies of English words during recent decades. However, it is not easy to find any previous corpus-based studies of the use of these two English adjectives. The main findings of the study are the following: (a) Overall, lovely(10584, 22.81 per million) is more frequently used than cute(7172, 15.46 per million). (b) Both are most used in FICTION, but the SPOKEN proportion of the total frequency is considerably different. (c) In lovely/cute+noun combinations, both are most frequently combined with human nouns. (d) According to COCA, lovely tends to combine strongly with female nouns(girl, lady, woman), while cute does not show such tendency. Cute occurs frequently with different kinds of nouns(girl, boy, baby), but it rarely occurs with lady or woman. These two English adjectives are closely related in meaning and hence are expected to behave very much alike, but their actual uses tum out to be very different.