A Corpus-Based Behavioral Profile Study On English Near-Synonymous Adjectives

Near-synonymy of English lexical items has always been a confusing and fallible phenomenon for Chinese English learners.The traditional way of discriminating near-synonyms mainly depends on the interpretations in dictionaries.However this type of interpretation is often cross-referenced,which makes English learners unable to clarify the similarities and differences between near-synonyms.Therefore,the differentiation of English near-synonyms should be of use to foreign language teaching and learning;moreover it can contribute to the supplement of the interpretations in dictionaries.However,compared with the issue of polysemy,the number of studies on lexical near-synonymy is still not enough.In addition,previous studies only focused on pairs of near-synonyms,or only examined the co-occurrence information of a certain kind of near-synonyms.In view of these limitations,the corpus-based behavioral profile(BP)approach came into being.This method focuses on the integration of morphological,syntactic,semantic and other factors and the retrieval of many distributional features of lexical items from the corpus so as to discriminate English near-synonyms in the most comprehensive way.Hence using the corpus-based behavioral profile approach and combining with quantitative analysis,this study explored the similarities and differences of a set of near-synonymous adjectives(fast,quick,rapid,swift,speedy,prompt)in terms of their internal structures and usage patterns.The research questions are as follows:1.What are the distributional behaviors of this set of near-synonymous adjectives based on corpus?2.What are the similarities and differences in the use of this set of near-synonyms?3.What is the network of relationship of this set of near-synonyms?By extracting the distributional patterns of the set of near-synonymous adjectives from the corpus in terms of their morphology,syntax,semantics and stylistics,and by using the R project to quantify the corpus data,the differences of their behavioral profiles are discussed in detail.The major findings of the study are presented as follows:Firstly,in terms of the frequency,quick is most frequently used by native English speakers among the six adjectives,followed by fast and rapid;as to swift,speedy,prompt,they exhibit a less higher frequency of use compared with the other three words.Among this set of adjectives fast is most often modified by adverbs,especially those full of emotions,to express feelings about the fast speed that somebody or something moves.In addition,based on each adjective’s distribution among five genres in COCA,it is found that quick appears most often in informal styles,while rapid appears most often in formal styles.Their overall degree of formality from less formal to more formal is quick,swift,speedy,fast,prompt,rapid.Secondly,with respect to the semantic connotations there is an overlap among the adjectives,meanwhile they have different emphasis.Rapid tends to collocate with words that represent fast changes that happen in a short period of time;quick and prompt put emphasis on the flexibility or agility of actions,whereas fast and speedy emphasize the high speed of actions.Swift,like quick and prompt,can not only express the flexibility of actions,but can also indicate the high speed of actions as fast and speedy.Thirdly,this set of near-synonyms constructs a hierarchical network in which fast and speedy are most similar in semantics and are relatively similar to quick and swift,while rapid and prompt are more close to each other in some ways than they are to others.The findings of this paper are of some practical significance to the discrimination of English near-synonyms in teaching and learning,especially the discrimination of English near-synonymous adjectives.On the one hand,in the process of teaching students should be instructed to learn near-synonyms from the perspectives of collocational attributes,syntactic patterns,stylistic styles and so on in order to fully and accurately grasp similarities and differences;on the other hand,Chinese English learners can use corpora to compare the frequency or the context of near-synonyms so as to further understand their usage patterns and make more proper use of them.In addition,this study also proves that the corpus-based behavioral profile approach can reveal more properties of near-synonyms in a comprehensive way and supplement interpretations in dictionaries.