A Corpus-based Analysis of the Semantic Relatedness between the American English -ic/-ical Adjective Pairs

Abstract

The English adjective pairs ending in -ic versus -ical share the stem, implyig the possibility of semantic relatedness as well as morphological relatedness. The corpus-based analysis of the bigrams(the -ic/-ical adjective with their R1 collocates) shows that some adjectives(analytic/analytical, classic/classical, historic, historical, magic/magical, etc) are semantically related to the degree that they can be interchangeably used. But others(economic/economical, politic/political, etc.) are not semantically related to the degree that they can not be used in place of each other. The semantic relatedness can be extended to the difference in meaning, when the bigrams are taken into account, excluding the shared R1 collocates.