A Corpus-Based Study of English Adjectives: ‘Wondrous’, ‘Prodigious’ and ‘Stupendous’ in BNC

The present study focuses on the frequency, collocations, noun modification, and semantic similarities and differences of three English adjectives: wondrous, prodigious, and stupendous to compare and contrast the similarities and differences in terms of meaning and collocation. The data was collected from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and The British National Corpus. The three adjectives were found to have the same fundamental meaning but differ in terms of specific meanings, degrees of formality, noun modification, and collocational patterns. Consequently, the three Adjectives cannot be used interchangeably in all situations. In addition, it was found that the corpus provides some additional data which is non-existent in the dictionary.