General: It includes many different styles and varieties, and is not limited to any particular subject field, genre or register. In particular, it contains examples of both spoken and written language.

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Analyzing definitions from the Macmillan English Dictionary we see that `little' can be used as a determiner, a pronoun, an adverb and adjective. For instance, as a determiner it is often used in the meaning `small amount or degree'; `not much': little choice; little progress; `hardly any of something': there's little point in discussing it any further; there's little or no hope. Besides `little' is often used with the article `a', meaning `some, but not a lot': a little time left. In spoken English it's more usual to say `a bit of', `a little bit': We knew a little bit more; a bit of money. As an adverb little/a little can be used in the meaning `slightly': She trembled a little; a little irritated [http://www.macmillandictionary.com].

Applying KWIC (Key Word in Context) option we singled out a number of instances for analysis that can be interpreted in the following way.

First, Figure 1 shows a selection of entries for the word “little”, and Figure 2 shows a selection of entries for “small”. In Figure 1 quite a few of the sentences wouldn't tolerate the substitution of small for little- for example 2,3,5,6,9,10,11,15,16,17 and 21. Taking 3 as an example, English does not permit “not a small irritated”. Of those instances where the substitution is possible, several would sound very odd or convey a different connotation, such as 1, 4 and 8.

Little is usually more absolute in its application than `small', and it is preferred to `small' when there is the intent to convey a hint of narrowness, pettiness, unimportance: silly little jokes; little mind.

2. From the analysis of a random sample of instances we can observe that the adjective `small', more frequently than the adjective `little', applies to things whose magnitude is determined by number, size, value or significance: a small group; a small house; a small income. `Small' is also used with the words `quantity', `amount', `size', `quite', `very', e.g.: a small quantity of sugar; a very small car (not a very little car).

A characteristic feature of `little', as we think, lies in the fact that it can express either positive or negative connotations, depending on the context. `Little' is appropriate when the context carries connotations of sympathy, tenderness, affection as in the following examples: a little old lady, poor little thing; a pretty little house. And it is used in a negative way for referring to somebody or something you dislike: You little scoundrel! a boring little man.

As the examples in Figure 2 show, little is more readily substitutable for small; part of the reason is that in its use as an adjective little does in fact carry denotations and connotations much like those of most uses of small. However, we observe from Figure 2 that the opposite is not true. This is because little is not only an adjective meaning `small' but also part of an adverb, in the expressions `a little ruffled, a little dispirited, and a little open where it modifies an adjective.

Conclusion

In this research work I have tried to explore the notion of corpus linguistics and its application. In the first Chapter I described the role of corpora in the world, its main characteristics and the use of it for different purposes. In the second Chapter I investigated linguistic peculiarities of semantically-related words small/little using the BYU-BNC. During the investigation I faced difficulties working with computer software as many of the programs are unavailable freely on the Internet, others require good understanding of corpus linguistic terms and analysis. It is evident that corpus linguistics is fast becoming an important subset of applied linguistics as a result of the rise of computers. Computer tools can accurately count the occurrence of linguistic items in texts with tremendous speed and accuracy. They permit the researcher to work with collections of data, too large to do manually and readily search for patterns in order to arrive at generalizations about language use that go beyond mere intuitions. Therefore, corpus-based analysis not only constitutes an extremely useful technological tool, but can be looked at as a type of approaches that makes it possible to do new types of investigations and conduct research on scope previously unfeasible. Without the computer-based corpora and computer programs it is impossible to do this lexical investigation objectively, accurately and efficiently, and to answer the research questions successfully.

Undoubtedly it is an undeniable fact that corpora have a number of features which make them important as sources of data for empirical linguistic research. We have seen a number of these exemplified in several areas of language study in which corpora have been, and may be, used. In brief the main important advantages of corpora are:

1. Ease of access. Using a corpus means that it is not necessary to go through a process of data collection: all the issues of sampling, collection and encoding have been dealt with by someone else. The majority of corpora are readily available: once the corpus has been obtained, it is also easy to access the data within it, because the corpus is in machine readable form, a concordance program can quickly extract frequency lists and indices of various words or other items within it.

2. Enriched data. Many corpora are now available already enriched with additional interpretive linguistic information such as part-of-speech annotation, grammatical parsing and prosodic transcription. Hence data retrieval from the corpus can be easier and more specific than with annotated data.

3. Naturalistic data. All corpus data are largely naturalistic, unmonitored and the product of real social contexts. Thus the corpus provides the most reliable source of data on language as it is actually used.

4. Because corpus linguistics is a methodology, all linguists could in principle use corpora in their studies of language: creating dictionaries, studying language change and variation, understanding the process of language acquisition, and improving foreign- and second-language instruction.

5. From the research work we can state that the results we have got are interesting, as the adjectives `small' and `little' carry different denotations and connotations despite being defined as synonyms by many dictionaries. As can be seen, the corpus-based approach to semantically-related words small/little proved to be helpful in language learning and provided the findings that would have been difficult to obtain otherwise.

Coming up to the conclusion I regard corpus-analytic techniques as multi-purpose strategies with an immense potential to enhance all sorts of textual analysis and to confirm or contradict our intuitions about patterns and meanings in literary and non-literary language. However, it is important to be familiar with modern computer software in order to investigate corpus data successfully. I see corpus analysis as a key skill that ought to reach all parts of the discipline as it can be equally applied to linguistics, literary studies, and language teaching. Once John Sinclair said: “Language cannot be invented; it can only be captured” And it can be captured by a corpus.

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