A Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition Of English Synonyms From The Perspective Of Co-Selection Theory

Co-selection theory is the core mechanism in language description and the most important theoretical interpretation in New Firth Corpus Linguistics(Sinclair,1991).It is the main research perspective and theoretical framework in phraseology.The theory effectively combines the words,grammar and meaning which are separated from each other in traditional linguistics,providing a new research perspective and scientific theoretical basis for discourse analysis and language performance.Synonym discrimination is a big obstacle for Chinese EFL learners.With the co-selection theory and authentic corpus data,this research could help learners master the different usages of synonyms effectively.Based on the corpus driven research method,the following two groups of synonyms: trend / tendency and important / significant are chosen by reference to Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus — — A Dictionary of Synonyms and The Thesaurus function of Sketch Engine.After comparing relevant data in COCA and WECCL 1.0,this research discusses the use of these two groups of synonyms by Chinese EFL learners,which includes the differences in typical collocates,colligational patterns and semantic prosody.Research questions are demonstrated as follows:(1)What is the similarity and difference between trend and tendency,important and significant in COCA?(2)What is the distinction of these two groups of synonyms between COCA and WECCL?(3)What causes the difference between native speakers and Chinese EFL learners?The results could be expounded from the following three aspects.Firstly,frequency distribution of the two groups of synonyms in five registers and different stages in COCA are distinct.For the first group of synonyms in this thesis,normalized frequency of trend in Spoken,Magazine,Newspaper and Academic field is higher than tendency,indicating that native speakers are inclined to employ trend to their communication.For the second group,normalized frequency of important in all registers and stages is higher than that of significant,testifying that important is used more widely.Secondly,there are significant differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers in their use of trend / tendency;important /significant.For the node word trend,the adjective collocates of trend in WECCL are less diverse than that in COCA,and learners overuse v art N and prep N slightly.As for the node word tendency,tendency and verb collocates have a high co-occurrence in the structure of v art N,which is quite different from that ofnative speakers in the structure of N to v.In regard to the second group of synonyms,noun collocates of important in WECCL is not so various as that of native speakers.As far as significant is concerned,learners often use adverbs with high degree to collocate with significant,while native speakers use such adverbs relatively less.In addition,learners have not mastered the usage of ADJ + that.Last but not least,the reasons that cause the difference between native speakers and Chinese EFL learners include insufficient input,confusion between synonyms and mother tongue transfer.This thesis discusses the different usages of the synonyms,so that Chinese EFL learners could grasp the differences between synonyms and choose words accurately in the process of language communication.This study also provides some reference for foreign language teaching.