基于语料库的同义动词的行为模式分析-以imply、indicate、 signify和suggest为例_英语论文

A Corpus-based Behavioral Profile Study of Four Near-synonymous Verbs--Imply, Indicate, Signify, and Suggest

摘要

同义词是一种既有趣又复杂的语言现象，同时它在英语词汇中占据了相当的比例,。 同义词表达了相同或相似的意思，但这也就给英语学习者造成了极大困难。使用纸质字典抑或是电子字典能够提供给学习者基本解释和帮助，但是由于这些字典有限的空间或容量和他们仅供查询的基本功能的局限，学习者依旧不能准确并且有效地辨析大部分的同义词，这就导致在日常交流中学习者难以选择恰当的词汇进行准确地表达。语料库语言学的出现给同义词的辨析提供了一个全新的视角。本次研究就以美国当代英语语料库作为检索数据库，并运用了基于语料库的行为模式分析方法来辨析一组功能复杂、搭配众多的同义动词（imply, indicate, signify, and suggest）之间的句法使用模式和内部语义结构。除了通过分析它们的常用搭配词进行其类联接和搭配模式的研究，本文还试图从其显著的语义和语域分布的区别切入进行分析，特别是从语义偏好和语义韵的角度。 此外，本文所得的结论补充了现有的该组同义动词的辨析的不足，同时证实了基于语料库的行为模式分析方法来辨析同义词的可行性，此外在教学法层面给同义词的教法和学法提供一些建议。

关键词：（近义）同义词动词；行为模式；分布模式；类联接；语义偏好；语义韵

Abstract 

Synonymy is an interesting but complicate linguistic phenomenon, which accounts for a large percentage in English. Conveying the same or nearly the same meanings, synonyms prove to be a big challenge for English learners. Though various English dictionaries either traditional or electronic ones may provide the learners with general guidance to some extent, they fail to distinguish between synonyms precisely due to the limitation of space and their basic retrieval function. So it is difficult for English learners to choose the proper words to express and communicate accurately and freely. The appearance of corpus linguistics offers the studies of synonymy a brand new perspective. The present study applies the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the retrieval data and employs a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis method to differentiate the syntactic usage patterns and internal semantic structure among imply, indicate, signify, and suggest---a set of four near-synonymous verbs known for their complex functional patterns and various collocates. Apart from examining their colligation and collocation patterns through analyzing the complements they frequently company with, the study also tries to identify prominent semantic differences and register distributions, especially the semantic preference and semantic prosody. Moreover, this study also has (i) added new findings to the existing descriptions of these target near-synonymous verbs, (ii) ascertained the feasibility of a corpus-based BP approach in the study of a set of synonymous verbs, and (iii) offered some advice in learning and teaching synonymous verbs pedagogically. 

Keywords: (near-) synonymous verbs, behavioral profile (BP), distributional pattern, colligation, semantic preference, semantic prosody

Contents

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Research background 1

1.2 Significance and aims of the present study 2

1.3 Research questions 3

1.4 Structure of the present study 3

2. Literature review 5

2.1 Theoretical background 5

2.1.1 Collocation 5

2.1.2 Colligation 5

2.1.3 Semantic preference 6

2.1.4 Semantic prosody 6

2.2 Related researches both at home and abroad 7

2.2.1 Related researches abroad 7

2.2.2 Related researches at home 9

3. Methodology 11

3.1 Research methods 11

3.1.1 Corpus-based BP approach 11

3.1.2 Quantitative and qualitative research method 11

3.2 Corpus and tool to be used 11

3.3 Corpus queries and analysis procedures 12

4. Data and analysis 13

4.1 The analysis of overall patterns 13

4.2 The analysis of colligation pattern 13

4.3 The analysis of collocation distributions and semantic preference 14

4.4 The analysis of semantic prosody 16

4.5 The analysis of cross-register distribution patterns 18

5. Conclusion 20

5.1 Summary of the study 20

5.2 Pedagogical implications 20

5.3 Limitations of the study and further research 21

References: 22

Appendix 24