A Corpus - Based Study Of Synonyms

There are a huge number of synonyms in English. The distinction of synonyms isthe difficulty in language teaching and learning. The traditional ways of synonyms’distinction research rely more on dictionary, intuition and introspection. We cannotdeny the authority of dictionaries, but only to rely on dictionaries to distinguishsynonyms has its deficiencies. The appearing of large-scale corpora and well-designedconcordance software, which has their unique advantages, provides both a newperspective and a new way of synonyms’ distinction. The present paper attempts toconduct a case study of the differentiation of English synonyms based on advancedCorpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). By combining both qualitativeanalysis and quantitative analysis, the present paper will distinguish a group ofsynonyms: gain，obtain，acquire and get from the perspectives of register, colligation,collocation, semantic preference and semantic prosody, aiming to expose theeffectiveness of corpus-based method of synonym distinction on one hand, and tooffer a new perspective of synonym distinction for teachers and learners on the otherhand. Corpus-based approach is not a replacement, but an indispensable supplementto the traditional ways of synonyms discrimination. Synonym differentiation based oncorpus is of significant pedagogical implications.