Collocational Patterns of Dimension Adjectives in Literary Texts

The main aim of this study is to identify the collocational aspects of dimension adjectives which are represented by short stories and to show the distrubitional properties of these aspects within the scope of adjective semantics. To reach this aim the main theoretical framework of the study has been formed by the views of Givon (2001), who presents the semantic prototypes of adjectives, and Bierwisch and Lang (1987), who discusses adjectives according to their semantic combination properties. Within thisscope, the following questions are answered by taking the prominent combination properties of dimension adjectives (for example, long way/space, long table/thing) into consideration: 1. What kind of semantic properties do the dimension adjectives in Turkish short stories show when the collocational combinations are regarded? 2. What kinds of properties do the collocational combinations show when types of meanings are regarded? In the study, collocational patterns of dimension adjectives are classified and a database is created according to the semantic properties of dimension adjectives. The findings of the study show that in the database most of the modifications are used with the adjectives small (339) and big (352) and different dimension adjectives show different distributions and different properties.