Adjectives describing attitudes to possession: Generous and Greedy

Abstract: The purpose for this essay was to find out what differences there are between
the adjectives generous and greedy regarding usage frequency and in what
contexts they are used. My research for this paper is based on a computer
search program called MP2.2 which was applied to the A files of the British
National Corpus.

After analysing and comparing the two adjectives, the following conclusion
was drawn: Generous was five times as often used compared to greedy, and a
possibility why this is so may be that people prefer to use more positively
loaded words. The fact that generous had a better result than greedy, may be
a reason why this adjective was used in so many more metaphorical expressions
than greedy, because if people often use a word, sooner or later they will
come up with new areas of usage.

In the metaphorical expressions generous often signified quantity, whereas
greedy was extended to the meaning of “taking something more figuratively”.