A Corpus-based Behavioral Profile Study Of Near-synonymous Verbs Of Obtaining

There exist a lot of near-synonyms in English,and the discrimination of nearsynonyms is always a critical issue in second language learning and teaching.The early research on near-synonyms relied mainly on introspection to distinguish synonyms.Although the method of introspection has its justification,it has many shortcomings in discriminating synonyms only by relying on intuition.With the empirical turn of cognitive linguistics,the corpus-based analysis has provided a new perspective and path for synonymy research.A large number of researches combining corpus and analytical tools have emerged at home and abroad to distinguish near-synonyms.Based on the BNC corpus,this thesis explores the similarities and differences in the internal semantic structure and usage patterns of a group of near-synonymous verbs(gain,obtain,achieve,acquire,attain,secure)using the corpus-based behavioral profile(BP)approach.In addition,categorization theory and construal theory are employed to explain the cognitive motivations underlying their similarities and differences in usage patterns.To begin with,we download all the instances of this group of synonyms from the BNC corpus and randomly select 2000 corpus for each of the six target words.Irrelevant language examples are manually deleted from the extracted corpus.Then,1000 target samples are randomly selected from the screened corpus as the target examples for this study,and these corpora are analyzed and marked manually.Finally,hierarchical cluster analysis and correspondence analysis are used to reveal the similarities and differences between the usage patterns of this group of near-synonyms.The findings are as follows:Firstly,the results of cluster analysis indicate that this group of near-synonymous verbs of “obtain” mainly cluster into two categories.Among them,achieve and attain are grouped into the first cluster(Cluster A),while gain,obtain,acquire and secure are aggregated into the second cluster(Cluster B).It implies that the usage features between achieve and attain are more similar,while the semantic similarities between gain,obtain,acquire and secure are greater.Secondly,the results of correspondence analysis indicate that the usage features of this group of near-synonymous verbs differ significantly in morphology,syntax,and semantics.Generally,all six verbs can co-occur with usage features such as declarative,affirmative,imperfect,active voice,transitive,abstract nouns,etc.Specifically,at the morphological level,the future tense,perfect,negative,participle,subjunctive and passive voice are more closely related to Cluster A verbs.The past tense,imperfect,intransitive and infinitive are more prominent in Cluster B verbs.At the syntactic level,there are significant differences between this group of near-synonymous verbs,mainly manifested in the following aspects: In terms of subject category,Cluster A verbs tend to take inanimate N,the third person pronoun or formal subject as the syntactic subject.The demonstrative pronoun correlates most frequently with achieve,whereas attain often uses exclusively Null subject.The subjects of Cluster B verbs are primarily living N,the first person pronoun.In terms of the types of clauses,the typical clause of obtain is adverbial C,and the most prominent clause of secure is attributive C.Cluster A verbs are more closely associated with object C and appositive C.Regarding adverb modifiers,Cluster A verbs are more frequently modified by adverbs than Cluster B verbs,among which Cluster A verbs are usually modified by adverbs of time,manner and frequency.In addition,for prepositional modifiers,obtain is most often used with from,gain is more often modified by over,and achieve tends to be collocated with by.Semantically,the contents obtained by Cluster A verbs are primarily achievement,including success,progress,and goal.Cluster B verbs tend to obtain entities,which mainly include living things,concrete things and abstract things.Besides,the semantic prosody of Cluster A verbs is commonly positive.In Cluster B,obtain is more likely to signify neutral semantic prosody,and acquire has a tendency to be used more significantly in negative semantic prosody.In contrast,secure and gain tend to be frequently used in positive semantic prosody.Finally,obtain is the most widely used and the most formal,whereas secure is the least frequently used in the formal form.Thirdly,based on categorization theory and construal theory,this study elaborates on the generation of this group of synonyms and analyzes their intrinsic cognitive motivations.It is found that the similarities of these synonyms are due to the synonyms being gathered around the concept of “family similarity”.The differences in synonyms are attributed to the different ways adopted by the cognitive subjects when they interpret the same objective things.Therefore,near-synonyms in the same category exhibit different semantics.This thesis,adopting the corpus-based behavioral profile approach,combining hierarchical cluster analysis and correspondence analysis,systematically investigates the usage features of this group of near-synonymous verbs denoting “obtain”.At the same time,this study employs categorization theory and construal theory to explore this group of near-synonyms in-depth and reveal the cognitive motivation underlying the similarities and differences in their semantic distribution.Moreover,based on previous research,this study conducts a fine-grained investigation of this group of near-synonyms.It proves the effectiveness and applicability of behavioral profile analysis in studying lexical semantics.The finding of results can also provide evidence and enlightenment for lexicography,English teaching and synonymy discrimination.