A Contrastive Study On The Features Of English Synonymous Adjectives Used By Chinese Learners And Native Speakers

Synonymy is a common but complicated linguistic phenomenon.To accurately identify the subtle difference between synonyms has always been a great challenge for EFL learners.By analyzing a large number of authentic materials,corpus-based studies have shown that lexical pairs that have similar cognitive or denotative meanings may differ in collocational,colligational or prosodic behavior.With the help of COCA and WECCL,the present study tries to find out to what degree Chinese English learners have grasped the synonyms APPROPRIATE,PROPER and SUITABLE,by answering the following three questions: 1)What are the respective features of the APPROPRIATE,PROPER and SUITABLE in terms of frequency,collocation,colligation,and semantic prosody in COCA? 2)What are the respective features of the three synonyms in terms of frequency,collocation,colligation and semantic prosody in WECCL? 3)What are the differences on the use of the three synonyms between Chinese learners and native speakers?The studies in COCA reveal that the three synonyms are quite distinctive for native speakers,especially in terms of collocation.However,Chinese learners'use of the three synonyms in WECCL shows nearly no significant difference.The contrastive study between COCA and WEECL indicates that:Chinese learners'use of the three synonyms is quite different from native speakers',especially in frequency and collocation.In terms of frequency,APPROPRIATE is significantly underused,while both PROPER and SUITABLE are overused by Chinese learners.As to collocation,the discrepancies are manifested in three aspects:1)inappropriate use of collocates.Chinese learners use a large number of untypical or even unacceptable collocations;2)semantic confusion.All the three words are most frequently used to collocate with ways,and all of them have been used in the sense of“good or right according to some socially accepted rules";3)substitution of synonyms.In many cases,the collocates learners use for one word are not significant collocates for this word in COCA,but they are significant collocates for one of its synonyms.Since all the three words can be translated to he2shi4de(???)in Chinese,learners may comprehend them from this perspective and deem them as fully synonymous and interchangeable,resulting in the semantic confusion,substitution of synonyms.And in order to avoid spelling errors,learners excessively use PROPER and SUITABLE,which are much easier to spell than APPROPRIATE.Based on the reasons above,this study proposes that,in English teaching,teachers should distinguish a group of synonyms from all aspects,including frequency,colligation,collocation and semantic prosody.Teachers should also try to avoid directly translating new words to Chinese,and encourage students to use native corpora as reference in their vocabulary learning and English writing.