Abstract
Teaching and learning how to utilize academic lexical items have always been a challenge in EFL setting. With the desire of making some contribution to the understanding of academic synonyms, this piece of research aims to investigate the meanings of the two verbs “alter” and “modify” through their collocations with nouns and the similarities and differences in their collocation patterns. The issue is approached from a corpus-based perspective and the method of lexical collocation. The findings of the study include: (1) the two verbs embrace the same denotation of “to change proportionally” in certain contexts; (2) “alter” possesses a broader sense when referring to an action of profound and fundamental change.
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