Meaning extension and grammatical gender in near synonymy analysis: A corpus based study

Abstract

Contrastive analysis of descriptive adjective hra bar - a, - o in Montenegrin and descriptive adjective brave as well as their near synonyms in English and Montenegrin will be employed in this paper in order to prove the presence of the descriptive adjectives' prevailing idiomatic meaning in both languages. The results of the analysis indicate that the semantic (and grammatical) aspects of words are reflected onto and within their collocational framework. Furthermore, it is expected that the collocational framework of the adjective hrabar - a, - o in Montenegrin will change depending upon the grammatical gender implied (masculine, feminine, neutral), as well as the sequence of its near synonyms. The same changes are not expected to occur in English due to its lack of grammatical gender. The methodology of the rese arch comprises the frequency of the primary and idiomatic meaning analyses of descriptive adjective hrabar, - a, - o, and its near synonyms based on the framework of the Contemporary Serbian language electronic corpus, (Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Scien ces, University of Belgrade), and the descriptive adjective brave and its near synonyms analyzed on the British National Corpus data (BNC) and the Words Bank: English database.

Keywords

• descriptive adjective
• near synonyms
• idiomatic meaning
• grammatical gender