COCA Context Feature-Based Study of Near-Synonymous Verbs——A Case Study of Forbid and Prohibit

English near-synonyms pose a great challenge for English learners and they often feel confused about them.This paper draws on the research findings of the distinction of synonymous pair:forbid and prohibit based on COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English)corpus online.The result shows that for collocation,forbid may be used to collocate with the infinitive(to do)oring participle,while prohibit often collocates with the preposition from.After register analysis,it is found that prohibit is more for⁃mal than forbid.As for semantic prosody,forbid is associated with neutral collocates,whereas prohibit appears to suggest a more negative semantic prosody.Detailed comparison and contrast about the two verbs can thus help English learners grasp the differenc⁃es of English synonyms accurately.