Study on the Sentiment Polarity Types of Collocations for too and very

This study is a corpus-based approach conducted to compare the two amplifiers too and very in terms of what sentiment polarity types can be attributed to the words in collocation with these adverbs. These adverbs are generally known as intensifying a given meaning of modified words, notably adjectives, verbs or nouns. However, based on the empirical examination of the British National Corpus (BNC), we assume that the prominent sentiment polarity type of the words collocated with very is dissimilar to that of the words collocated with too. For instance, while the adjectives collocated with very expresses rather a positive sentiment polarity like in ‘The soup is very tasty’, those appeared with too mostly express a negative sentiment polarity like in ‘This car is too expensive’. In most previous works, it is asserted that it is due to the particular semantic function of the adverb too, since no matter what semantic types of adjectives are, the sequences such as too small, too bright or too young express a negative evaluation. Nevertheless, we advocate that this interpretation does not result from the special function of too, but from the semantic orientation itself of the words collocated with these adverbs. The experiment we performed in this study reveals that the adjectives of negative polarity co-occur with too 7 times more frequently than those of positive polarity. On the contrary, the adjectives of positive polarity co-occur with very 2.6 times more frequently than those of negative polarity. The distribution of part-of-speech in the position collocated with these adverbs, the proportion of words with positive/negative/neutral polarity and the corpus types such as formal/written texts or informal/spoken texts are discussed as well, to clarify the empirical differences of these adverbs.