Effectiveness of Corpus in Distinguishing Two Near-Synonymous Verbs: Damage and Destroy

Abstract

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair damage and destroy commonly misused by Chinese-speaking learners of English in terms of frequencies, genre distribution, colligation and collocation, differences in meanings and uses. It is found that damage and destroy are near-synonyms because they are relevant words and share most collocates but they are not fully intersubstitutable for certain contexts. Some words related to the human body or physical health are more collocated with damage and some such as military affairs and one’s thought or belief more with destroy. In addition, the core meaning of damage gives more emphasis on something that can be recovered but does not work well as before, while destroy offers more senses for something that no longer exists. Furthermore, the British tend to collocate the two near-synonyms with the same word to create a build-up, because destroy is endowed with a stronger degree of destruction than damage. The study ends by suggesting corpus-based analysis should be promoted in language teaching and learning to improve the accurate use of English vocabulary by language learners.

A Contrastive Corpus-based Study of American and English Adjectives: ‘Important’ and ‘Significant’

“…Furthermore, the current findings of this study in line with Chanchotphattha (2013) who stated that the two regions of Britain and North America have distinct dialects that are frequently utilized with distinctive patterns. Additionally, the finding also in line with Petcharat and Phoocharoensil (2017), Selmistraitis (2020) and Song (2021) that synonymous words show some distinctions in terms of collocation and semantic preference even they share the same core meaning and degree of formality, resulting that they cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts (Cai, 2012;Hu, 2015;Phitayakorn, 2016;Phoocharoensil, 2010). It can be stated that the corpus offers some insightful information which is non-exist in the dictionaries.…”

Research on the Reform of ID Course under the Background of 3E—A Case Study of ID in Sichuan Normal University

“…This is because crucial semantic properties may remain unidentified without specially designed ID tags (Proos 2019); meanwhile, the use of highly subjective semantic ID tags has already been justified by Glynn (2010b); finally, it is actually hard for even synonym dictionaries to pre-determine a set of semantic dimensions for differentiating synonyms (Edmonds 1999). Morpho-syntactic ID tags are not the focus of this study, as they may have low discriminatory power in actual synonym analyses (Divjak 2010: 140;Gu 2017;Jarunwaraphan and Mallikamas 2020;Song 2021).…”

Attitudinal Meaning toward Extremism as Constructed by Social Media Users

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