A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of English Synonyms

The study of vocabulary has always been the focus of language research.Without vocabulary,people can not express anything.English vocabulary is very complicated.It is especially noteworthy that there are a lot of synonyms in English.The reasonable selection and application of synonyms can make the expression more accurate and vivid,and improve the effectiveness and expressiveness of language.Based on a large number of real and natural examples of language use provided by the corpus,this paper explores the differences between Chinese English learners and English native speakers in the use of synonyms,which can better provide help for second language vocabulary teaching.This study selects the British National Corpus(BNC)and the Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC).The corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis method is adopted.With the help of WordNet,AntConc 3.5.8,BFSU Collocator 1.0,Chi-Square Calculator,this paper studies the synonyms specially,especially and particularly.In this study,this group of synonyms is searched in the CLEC and the BNC respectively,and the similarities and differences in frequency,collocation and semantic prosody are analyzed.This study also compares the different levels of Chinese English learners' use of this group of synonyms in the three dimensions mentioned above.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)Compared with English native speakers,in terms of frequency,Chinese English learners tent to overuse especially,whereas underuse particularly.There is no significant difference about the frequency of specially.(2)Compared with English native speakers,in terms of collocation,as for especially,Chinese English learners obviously use it better,but as for specially and particularly,Chinese English learners do not use it well.(3)Compared with English native speakers,in terms of semantic prosody,especially is relatively close to the native speakers,but specially and particularly are quite different from English native speakers.(4)In the CLEC,with the improvement of learning level,in terms of frequency,there is still a situation of underuse and overuse.The collocation of these three synonyms has improved.But for the collocation of particularly,even the higher level students are still not good at using it.The semantic prosody of these three synonyms has not improved.Based on these findings,this paper provides some implications for English synonyms teaching and dictionary compilation,as well as suggestions for future research.