摘要
With the advancement and prevalence of computer engineering, corpus-based approach of language analysis is onthe rise. In this study, corpus-based approach is being adopted to compare two verbal synonyms---obtain and gainin terms of genre, colligation, collocation, and semantic prosody. The online tools, such as Sketch Engine, BNCWeb, and dust the Word, are been adopted. The differences of two synonyms are as following： Noun is morecollocated with obtain and passive voice pattern with preposition is more widely used. The verb form gain iscollocated with abstract noun and most of them are endowed with the positive semantic prosody. It is also foundthat Oxford Dictionary failed to add the semantic prosody and dropped the frequently used collocation such as＂obtained by pretence＂. For ESL （English as Second Language） teachers, they should be cautious in the traditionalpractice of explaining meaning to leaners by offering synonyms.
