ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2023.05.007
A Corpus-based Comparative Study on English Synonyms in COCA: Taking Illustrate, Explain and Interpret as Examples
Shujuan Liu
School of Foreign Languages, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, Hebei, China.
*Corresponding author: Shujuan Liu
Published: July 05, 2023
Abstract
Synonym discrimination is the focus and difficulty of English learning. Its tea-ching and learning are the key to learners’ deep acquisition of vocabulary and correct use of words. Basic English education in China attaches great importance to learners’ understanding and application of synonyms. The analysis of synonyms in basic teaching accounts for a large proportion of teaching. However, the limitations of traditional teaching methods lead to inaccurate discrimination of synonyms. The corpus-based research method has become a new perspective of research, which enables learners to distinguish the nuances of synonyms more intuitively and is very effective for English synonym discrimination. Therefore, this study uses the COCA corpus to explore the differences of the synonymous verbs illustrate, explain and interpret from four aspects, and makes a comparative analysis of their word frequency distribution, register distribution and collocations. This study aims to accurately distinguish the differences of synonyms in this group and improve learners’ awareness of using corpus as a learning tool.
Keyword
Corpus, synonym, word frequency, register, collocation
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Copyright
© 2023 by the author(s).
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How to cite this paper
A Corpus-based Comparative Study on English Synonyms in COCA: Taking Illustrate, Explain and Interpret as Examples
How to cite this paper: Shujuan Liu. (2023). A Corpus-based Comparative Study on English Synonyms in COCA: Taking Illustrate, Explain and Interpret as Examples. The Educational Review, USA, 7(5), 577-580.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2023.05.007