Semantic Preference, Prosody and Distribution of Synonymous Adjectives in COCA

Abstract

Synonymous word pairs often become an obstacle on the road to favourable result in composing academic texts because semantic prosody and semantic preference of these words are neglected. The current study examined the concordance lines with synonymous adjectives succinct & concise, coherent & cohesive, precise & accurate in the academic texts of Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and identified semantics of co-occurring collocates, interchangeability of synonyms and their distribution across nine academic disciplines. The research describes the semantic arrangement of collocations with synonymous pairs of words and encourages persons with academic pursuits rely on corpus data based tools to improve knowledge of semantic prosody and preference of words with similar meanings. The study showed that near synonyms succinct & concise, coherent & cohesive, precise & accurate have different semantic preference and distribution across registers which should be taken into consideration while building collocations with these words. However, semantic prosody tendencies of these synonyms are similar. The analysed synonyms cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. They are also unevenly scattered across registers. The current study will help to improve learning, teaching, and research of English academic vocabulary in its many contexts.

Semantic prosody and collocation: A corpus study of the near-synonyms persist and persevere

“…Such dependence on both the collocational patterns and the prosodic behavior of persist and persevere allows for greater possibilities of discriminating the two near-synonyms effectively, which are consistent with previous studies in that near-synonyms, despite some overlap in core meaning, tend to co-select particularly different sets of synonyms (e.g. Crawford & Csomay, 2016;Jirananthiporn, 2018;Partington, 1998Partington, , 2004Phoocharoensil, 2020;Selmistraitis, 2020). In this study, persist is more like to appear with lexical items denoting negative meanings, whereas persevere strongly collocates with Christianity-oriented vocabulary and lexical items related to difficulties and determination.…”

“…However, this particular prosody does not exist in normal British conversation. Selmistraitis (2020), in addition, explored the semantic preference/prosody of three pairs of adjective synonyms, namely succinct & concise, coherent & cohesive, and precise & accurate in the academic texts of Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Despite the fact that the target pairs of synonyms are similar in meaning, they differ in semantic preference and prosody.…”

“…A number of studies have shown that near-synonyms differ in many aspects, including degree of formality (e.g., Jirananthiporn, 2018;Petcharat & Phoocharoensil, 2017), connotations (e.g., Partington, 1998;Stubbs, 1995), collocations (e.g., Crawford and Csomay, 2016;Jirananthiporn, 2018;Phoocharoensil, 2010Phoocharoensil, , 2020, semantic prosody (e.g., Nelson, 2006;Partington, 1998Partington, , 2004Selmistraitis, 2020), and grammatical patterns (e.g., Phoocharoensil, 2010).…”

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.…”