A COCA-based Study On English Synonyms

Synonyms are the most important part of the English vocabulary.However,how to differentiate them has always been perplexing second language learners.In this research,based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),three commonly used synonyms—power,energy and strength—are compared.The differentiation is carried out from three perspectives:namely,frequency/genre distribution,collocation and Mutual Information(MI)value,as well as semantic prosody.The results of this study indicate that significant differences of the three synonyms exist in American English.From the total number of occurrence,the scope of application of power is the largest,and the usage rate of energy is higher than strength.From the total number of frequency,the result is the same.And during 22 years(1990-2012),the usage of power is relatively stable;the usage of energy is on the rise;the usage of strength is on the slowly decline.Besides,the collocation,MI value and semantic prosody of these words are not the same.Compared with power and energy,strength does not have negative semantic prosody.In summary,power is the generic term of all kinds of force;energy is related with all kinds of power sources;and strength is related with the power of human body.This study aims at expanding the research in the field of synonyms,through a detailed introduction to the corpus-based method.