 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Corpus-Based Study of Two Synonyms—Obtain and Gain
Bing-jie GU
Full-Text PDF
XML 2984 Views
DOI:10.17265/1539-8072/2017.08.006
Ningbo Dahongying University, Ningbo, China
With the advancement and prevalence of computer engineering, corpus-based approach of language analysis is on the rise. In this study, corpus-based approach is being adopted to compare two verbal synonyms—obtain and gain in terms of genre, colligation, collocation, and semantic prosody. The online tools, such as Sketch Engine, BNC Web, and Just the Word, are been adopted. The differences of two synonyms are as following: Noun is more collocated with obtain and passive voice pattern with preposition is more widely used. The verb form gain is collocated with abstract noun and most of them are endowed with the positive semantic prosody. It is also found that 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 traditional practice of explaining meaning to leaners by offering synonyms. Moreover, semantic prosody should be taken into account in translating English into Chinese.
synonyms, colligation, collocation, semantic prosody
Firth, J. (1957). Papers in linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Francis, G., Hunston, S., & Manning, E. (1996). Collins cobuild grammar patterns 1: Verbs. London: Harper Collins.
Halliday, M. A. K., Teubert, W., & Cermakova, A. (2005). Lexicology and corpus linguistics: An introduction. London and New York: Continuum.
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McEnery, T., XIAO, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. London and New York: Routledge.
McGee, I. (2012a). Collocation dictionaries as introductive learning resources in data-driven learning—An analysis and evaluation. International Journal of Lexicography, 25(3), 319-361.
McGee, I. (2012b). Should we teach semantic prosody awareness? RELC Journal, 43(2), 169-186.
Oxford Dictionary Online. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com
Sinclair, M, J. (1996). The search for units of meaning. Texus (9/1), 75-106.
Sinclair, M, J. (2004). Trust the text: Language, corpus and discourse. London: Routledge.
Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and corpus linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
XIAO, R. Z. (2008). Theory-driven corpus research: Using corpora to inform aspect theory. In A. Ludeling and M. Kyto (Eds.), Corpus linguistics: An international handbook (pp. 987-1008). Birling: Mouton de Gruyter.
XIAO, R., & McEnery, T. (2006). Collocation, semantic prosody, and near synonymy: A cross-linguistic perspective. Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 103-129.
Yeh, Y., Liou, H., & LI, Y. (2007). Online synonym materials and concordancing for EFL college writing. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 20(2), 131-152