Abstract

Synonymy is an interesting but complicate linguistic phenomenon, which accounts for a large percentage in English. Conveying the same or nearly the same meanings, synonyms prove to be a big challenge for English learners. Though various English dictionaries either traditional or electronic ones may provide the learners with general guidance to some extent, they fail to distinguish between synonyms precisely due to the limitation of space and their basic retrieval function. So it is difficult for English learners to choose the proper words to express and communicate accurately and freely. The appearance of corpus linguistics offers the studies of synonymy a brand new perspective. The present study applies the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the retrieval data and employs a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis method to differentiate the syntactic usage patterns and internal semantic structure among imply, indicate, signify, and suggest---a set of four near-synonymous verbs known for their complex functional patterns and various collocates. Apart from examining their colligation and collocation patterns through analyzing the complements they frequently company with, the study also tries to identify prominent semantic differences and register distributions, especially the semantic preference and semantic prosody. Moreover, this study also has (i) added new findings to the existing descriptions of these target near-synonymous verbs, (ii) ascertained the feasibility of a corpus-based BP approach in the study of a set of synonymous verbs, and (iii) offered some advice in learning and teaching synonymous verbs pedagogically. 

Keywords: (near-) synonymous verbs, behavioral profile (BP), distributional pattern, colligation, semantic preference, semantic prosody

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Research background-1

1.2 Significance and aims of the present study-2

1.3 Research questions-3

1.4 Structure of the present study-3

2. Literature review-5

2.1 Theoretical background-5

2.1.1 Collocation-5

2.1.2 Colligation-5

2.1.3 Semantic preference-6

2.1.4 Semantic prosody-6

2.2 Related researches both at home and abroad-7

2.2.1 Related researches abroad-7

2.2.2 Related researches at home-9

3. Methodology-11

3.1 Research methods-11

3.1.1 Corpus-based BP approach-11

3.1.2 Quantitative and qualitative research method-11

3.2 Corpus and tool to be used-11

3.3 Corpus queries and analysis procedures-12

4. Data and analysis-13

4.1 The analysis of overall patterns-13

4.2 The analysis of colligation pattern-13

4.3 The analysis of collocation distributions and semantic preference-14

4.4 The analysis of semantic prosody-16

4.5 The analysis of cross-register distribution patterns-18

5. Conclusion-20

5.1 Summary of the study-20

5.2 Pedagogical implications-20

5.3 Limitations of the study and further research-21

References:-22

Appendix-24