A Corpus-Based Error Analysis Of English Synonyms

Correct use of English vocabulary, especially synonyms, is one of the difficulties in English learning. It is also a key point for Chinese learners of English to improve their English especially their vocabulary use. However, they often make mistakes in using synonyms. Recently, with the introduction of corpus to language teaching, corpus-based research on vocabulary teaching has received increasing attention in the field of foreign language teaching.In order to investigate the errors made by Chinese learners of English in using English synonyms, this study takes the English synonyms of end, including end,stop,close,finish and conclude, as its subjects, sampling data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) and the Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC). It first analyzes whether there are significant differences between Chinese learners of English and native speakers of English in the frequency distribution of the synonyms. Then, following the procedures proposed by Corder for error analysis, this study analyzes the errors made by Chinese learners of English in using these synonyms in terms of word colligation, collocation and semantic prosody, and explores the possible reasons.It is found that Chinese learners of English differ from native speakers of English in the use of the synonyms of end in terms of word frequency. Specifically, the former use finish most frequently, followed by stop, while the latter use stop most frequently, followed by end. Twenty-two colligation errors, made by Chinese learners of English, are identified, among which stop ranks the first, with 10 occurrences. Errors are also found with other synonyms in colligation. For instance, close colligation(V*+CONJ) is misused by following stop colligation. In addition, it is found that the errors in the collocation of these synonyms are mainly in the form of “Chinese English”. This is because the Chinese learners of English are inadequately exposed to the connotative meanings and the correct collocation of these synonyms, and they tend to use word-to-word translation in their writing, an effect called mother tongue transfer. Nevertheless, in terms of semantic prosody, it is found that the Chinese learners of English can correctly choose the semantic features, performing equally well as the native speakers, though there are some minor misuses.Based on the research findings, this thesis provides some suggestions for both teachers and students on vocabulary(synonyms in particular) teaching and learning. It is hoped that the study can be of some help and value to vocabulary teaching.