A Corpus-Based Study Of Amplifier-Specific Synonym Differentiation

With multitudinous synonyms in English language, learners have great difficulties using them appropriately. Surveys have shown that many English learners are incapable of distinguishing synonyms comprehensively, let alone to use synonyms in a pure and proper way. Consequently, various thesauri (synonym dictionaries) are designed and compiled.In most of the published thesauri, synonymous entries are distinguished by an introspective approach, that is, lexicographers qualitatively contrive a definition for each entry according to their innate knowledge; and meanwhile, they select or even make up examples to explain the definition. These dictionaries can, in a sense, help learners have a preliminary comprehension of the differences between synonyms; however, they do not provide learners with real statistics and valid information that serve to show the significant nuances of synonyms.Corpora, as they are, can offer what the learners really need in language study. In terms of synonym differentiation, corpora have the unique virtue of presenting objective and authentic data. So far, many linguists have conducted corpus-based investigations into synonym differentiation from diverse aspects, including the unitary frequency, register-specific frequency and collocational behaviors. Collocational behaviors are further studied from two sub-aspects, such as frequency of collocates and semantic prosody of collocates. Empirical studies show that corpus-based approach to synonym differentiation has shed light on either lexicography or pedagogy.Adopting the corpus-based approach and applying the qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques, the current research tends to explore and elaborate the possibilities, procedures and implications of distinguishing amplifier-specific synonyms from the perspective of syntactic positions. Five chapters constitute the thesis. Chapter 1 introduces the research background, significance, objectives and the thesis structure. Chapter 2 reviews the development in corpus linguistics and the previous corpus-based studies on synonym differentiation. Chapter 3 describes the approaches, instruments and procedures in the research. Chapter 4 discovers and discusses the different properties of amplifier-specific synonyms in different syntactic positions by the analyses of the real corpus data. Chapter 5 concludes the major findings and clarifies the implications and limitations of the current work. This work is attempting to speculate about the significance of corpus-based approach on both thesauri compilation and synonym instruction and acquisition.