摘要
The analysis of near-synonyms has always been a difficult point in English learning.There have been some relevant studies on the analysis of near-synonyms at home and abroad,but the examples are still insufficient.Based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),this paper takes“absolutely”and“utterly”as an example,and makes a comparative analysis from the five aspects of register,collocation,collocation,semantic preference and semantic prosody,aiming to make full use of the corpus in the analysis of English near-synonyms,providing a useful supplement for second language teaching and English learning.The results show that“absolutely”is more common in spoken language while utterly is more formal;regarding the collocation,both words are more associated with adjectives and verbs;in terms of colligation patterns,“absolutely”have six kinds of grammatical patterns while there are only four grammatical patterns of“utterly”;as for semantic preference,the semantic preference of“utterly”has a wider range than that of“absolutely”;for semantic prosody,“absolutely”have more neutral semantic prosody whereas“utterly”have stronger negative semantic prosody.This case study not only provides enlightenment for English learning and teaching,but also further enriches the corpus linguistics-related research.
