A Comparative Study of Right Collocates of Tiny, Small, and Minute in British National Corpus

The meaning of a word can be established, in part, by looking at the words frequently collocating with it. The present study establishes and compares the various senses and meanings of three apparently synonymous adjectives - tiny, small, and minute - by examining their immediate right collocates. The study draws upon the British National Corpus (BNC), comprising 100 million words. The corpus was accessed through English-corpora.org. The results reveal that the three selected adjectives differ not only in their frequencies and register distribution but also in their sense and meaning. Out of the three adjectives, small is most frequently used in the BNC. Moreover, the positive forms of all three adjectives are most commonly used in the BNC as compared to their comparative and superlative forms. As regards the meaning, although there are some similarities, each of the three adjectives conveys certain sense(s) which are not shared by the others. The study conclude that the three selected adjectives are not strict synonyms and cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. The findings of this corpus-based investigation were also compared with the definitions and illustrations of the three selected adjectives in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2010). The results of the present study have implications for lexicography and English language teaching.