Abstract
As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of career and job by conducting the analysis of concordance, collocation, word sketches and sketch difference. The results show that different functions of SkE can make different contributions to the discrimination of career and job. The pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.
Highlights
English is particular rich in synonyms due to historical reasons, which enables English speakers “to convey meanings more precisely and effectively for the right audience and context” (Liu & Espino 2012: 198)
Synonyms of Career In Sketch Engine (SkE) the automatic identification of synonymy is achieved by the tool Thesaurus
If we find examples of both professional career and professional job, that is some evidence that the two nouns career and job are similar
Summary
English is particular rich in synonyms due to historical reasons, which enables English speakers “to convey meanings more precisely and effectively for the right audience and context” (Liu & Espino 2012: 198). They differ in shades of meaning and vary in their collocations. Collocations are inaccessible to a speaker’s conscious introspection (Hunston 2002: 142; Louw 1993: 173; Partington 1998: 68). With the development of corpora and corpora analysis tools, collocations have been addressed much more and frequently by linguists (Hunston 2002; Louw 1993, 2000; Partington 1998; Schmitt & Carter 2004; Sinclair 1991; Stubbs 1995, 1996, 2001; Xiao & Mcenery 2006)
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