A Corpus-based Study of the Near-synonyms: Purpose, Goal and Objective

Abstract

Synonyms can be problematic for EFL learners since each synonym has distinct meanings to be used in different context. The purposes of this corpus-based study are to investigate distinctions of the synonymous nouns purpose, goal and objective based on the distribution across genres in which the degree of formality is determined and to examine their verb and adjective collocates in relation to semantic preference. The three target synonyms were analyzed by using data drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results from the frequency of distribution across genres suggests that the three target synonyms most frequently occur in formal contexts, e.g., academic texts, and they tend to have similar occurrences across genres. In terms of the common verb and adjective collocates, the top-thirty verb and adjective collocates of the target synonyms with the highest frequency and the significant MI score level of ≥ 3 were presented and the collocates with similar meanings were categorized into themes based on their semantic preference. It was found that the three synonymous nouns are near-synonyms with the more closely related status of objective and goal because they share more overlapping semantically-related themes and collocations. However, these synonyms also co-occur with particular verbs or adjectives. This differentiation of collocational patterns of the near-synonyms indicates that they cannot be substitutable in all contexts and the precise usage of each synonym should be taken into consideration.