A Comparative Study On The Collocation, Colligation And Semantic Prosody Of WIN Near-synonyms

English is said to be rich in synonyms. According to statistics, English synonyms account for more than 60% of the total vocabulary; so it is safe to say that a mastery of English must be a mastery of English synonyms. However, many English synonyms can be understood but difficult to use accurately, which is the personal experience of a lot of English language learners. The reason for this may be related to our study on synonyms. The traditional synonym teaching mainly carries out analysis from the nuances of vocabulary, usage and phrases. Due to the neglect of colligation and semantic prosody, although students remember a lot of word rules, they still make mistakes when using synonyms. Since semantic prosody and colligation of English words play a crucial role in production of native-like language, the study from a perspective of colligation and semantic prosody can expose the problems which have never been discovered before.This paper aims at exploring colligational and semantic prosodic features of the following synonym group: WIN, GAIN, EARN, and OBTAIN by drawing a comparison of the semantic prosodic and colligational information revealed by British National Corpus and Chinese Learner English Corpus. Through adopting a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis of the extracted data, the author investigates the collocational behaviors of the four synonym lexical items. At first, these items are concordanced in turn through AntConc 3.2.1w in CLEC and the on line concordancer in BNC and then the collocates of the items are extracted and analyzed, in the end colligational and semantic prosodic features of the four words are summarized.The study indicates that Chinese English learners have displayed similar characteristics of semantic prosody and patterns of colligation to the native speakers in use of these lexical items. But many cases show inadequacies, especially in the representation of collogitional patterns and the positive and neutral prosodic features. In addition, from the point of view of collocation, English learners lack typical collocates, and there exist a large number of non-idiomatic collocates and pragmatic errors. Factors affecting learners'use were sketched: first one is lack of typicality in teaching and teachers'inadequate knowledge of the verbs; another one is different culture and psychological elements which make learners use some of these words more positive and less neutral or negative than native speakers; the last factor is native language interference, which appears in the relationship among native language, target language and interlanguage. Learners'lacking adequate acquisition of target language consequently makes them transfer Chinese equivalent into their English usage, invokes pragmatic confusion and gives readers a sense of foreign-soundings. To avoid such confusions, a focus on vocabulary teaching was suggested; that is a focus on typical collocates, lexical patterns of word by means of providing adequate idiomatic examples of the lexical item even through retrieving corpus. To sum up, acquiring a word entails learning what grammatical patterns it tends to have and what words and what semantic associations it constantly co-occurs.