Edited by Hilde Hasselgård, Jarle Ebeling and Signe Oksefjell Ebeling
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 57] 2013
► pp. 47–68
This paper reports on a study of attributive adjective sequences belonging to the semantic field of size, examples of which are ‘enormous great’ and ‘wee little’. It takes as its starting point a brief outline of the phenomenon provided by the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002), in which it is referred to as ‘intensificatory tautology’. The paper begins by defining the lexical set to be investigated, and thereafter provides details of the relevant adjectival sequences found in the British National Corpus. Particular attention is paid to the relatively frequent pairs great big, tiny little and little tiny. Information is also given with regard to other semantic fields which corpus data suggests could usefully be investigated.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.