Semantic preference and prosody of adjective eri and its derivatives in Finnish

This master's thesis deals with the semantic preference and prosody of the eri adjective and its derivatives in Finnish. The thesis focuses on a group of adjectives with the same root and almost synonymous or very close meanings. The first part of this thesis is dedicated to the theory of semantics and meaning, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations (especially synonymy and collocations), to the definition of the class of adjectives and the definition of semantic preference and prosody. The second part focuses on the collocational analysis and the analysis of the semantic preference and prosody of adjectives erikoinen and erityinen which are nearly synonymous. The last part of this thesis provides the semantic profiles of these two adjectives which are based on the results of the collocational analysis. Key words: Finnish, adjectives, semantic preference and prosody, collocational analysis, corpus linguistics, erikoinen, erityine