Abstract
This corpus-based study examines genres and collocation patterns in which the three synonyms ‘consequence’, ‘result’, and ‘outcome’ usually occur. The data on which the study is based is derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Of all the eight genres currently available in COCA, the three synonyms appear with the highest frequency in academic texts, whereas frequencies are lowest in informal genres, i.e. TV and movie subtitles and fiction. Of pedagogical concern is the fact that the common verb and adjective collocates repeatedly co-occur with the synonymous nouns. Determined by the COCA frequency and the MI value (≥ 3), ‘consequence’ is often used with verbs and adjectives conveying negative senses, and the typical collocates of ‘result’ has a clear association with research-oriented contexts. The collocates of ‘outcome’ have the broadest variety of semantic properties but are not directly related to any specific contexts. It is highly recommended that EFL teachers apply this genre and collocational information to synonym development lessons. Keywords: synonym; genre; distribution across genres; collocation; adjective and verb collocates
Highlights
Vocabulary learning is a key to second language (L2) acquisition
The data of the present study was drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a very large, genre-balanced corpus of American English
It is considered a counterpart to the British National Corpus (BNC), which was originally created by Oxford University Press in the 1980s and early 1990s and contains 100 million words of texts from a wide range of genres, such as spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and academic
Summary
Vocabulary learning is a key to second language (L2) acquisition. Out of all lexical items, synonyms often prove to be challenging for learners’ acquisition of L2 vocabulary (Sridhanyarat, 2018). According to Webb and Nation (2017), a synonym refers to “a word or phrase that has the same meaning as another word or phrase” Speaking, synonymy is a bilateral or symmetrical lexical relation in which two or more linguistic forms share the same meaning (Szudarski, 2018). Semanticists investigate synonymy by looking at a relationship of similarity or sameness of meaning between two or more words (Jackson and Amvela, 2007). As a matter of fact, no nearsynonyms are identical in every detail, and replacing one with its synonym can lead to some deviation or ungrammaticality in L2 (Thornbury, 2002)
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