In the English language, there are many words which are considered synonymous in that dictionaries and thesauruses often define them in identical meanings. Under such circumstances, EFL learners are confronted with a ...In the English language, there are many words which are considered synonymous in that dictionaries and thesauruses often define them in identical meanings. Under such circumstances, EFL learners are confronted with a big difficulty in acquiring these words of similar meanings. They often regard synonymous words as equivalents and use them alternately, which sometimes result in ambiguity or awkwardness of their language. However, with the advent of corpora and concordancing programs, a new way of investigating and learning English synonymous words has emerged. This paper explores colligational patterns, collocational behavior and semantic prosody of two seemingly synonymous verbs, gain and obtain, in two native speaker corpora, the Brown Corpus and the LOB Corpus, in order to show how these 'equivalencies' can be misleading because 'synonymous' words are typically used in different ways. The study also examines EFL learners' behavior in using synonymous words by investigating the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). From the results of the study, it can be seen that Chinese EFL learners have not yet acquired a full understanding of the usage of gain and obtain with respect to colligation, collocation and semantic prosody. Their underuses and overuses of some grammatical forms and lexical patterns of the two target synonymous words might be influenced either by their mother tongue or by the registers of their English writing or by both. The paper finally discusses the implications of corpus-based study in vocabulary teaching and learning in general.展开更多
文摘In the English language, there are many words which are considered synonymous in that dictionaries and thesauruses often define them in identical meanings. Under such circumstances, EFL learners are confronted with a big difficulty in acquiring these words of similar meanings. They often regard synonymous words as equivalents and use them alternately, which sometimes result in ambiguity or awkwardness of their language. However, with the advent of corpora and concordancing programs, a new way of investigating and learning English synonymous words has emerged. This paper explores colligational patterns, collocational behavior and semantic prosody of two seemingly synonymous verbs, gain and obtain, in two native speaker corpora, the Brown Corpus and the LOB Corpus, in order to show how these 'equivalencies' can be misleading because 'synonymous' words are typically used in different ways. The study also examines EFL learners' behavior in using synonymous words by investigating the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). From the results of the study, it can be seen that Chinese EFL learners have not yet acquired a full understanding of the usage of gain and obtain with respect to colligation, collocation and semantic prosody. Their underuses and overuses of some grammatical forms and lexical patterns of the two target synonymous words might be influenced either by their mother tongue or by the registers of their English writing or by both. The paper finally discusses the implications of corpus-based study in vocabulary teaching and learning in general.
