Abstract: This study examines three synonyms in English, i.e. claim, declare and announce, concentrating on their lexical, syntactic, and stylistic information. The data were drawn from three learner’s dictionaries in comparison with the corpus-informed data. It has been discovered that the linguistic information from those dictionaries do not provide all thorough details of the words, e.g. grammatical patterns, collocations, etc. The corpus-based data seem to be useful as they contribute to supplying additional information nonexistent in the dictionaries. Furthermore, learners can search for more sample sentences of synonyms from corpora so that they will be able to have access to subtle meanings of them.

Keywords: English synonyms; corpus-based; learners’ dictionaries

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1 Introduction-1

1.1 Background of Disambiguating Para-synonyms-1

1.2 Objectives of the Study-3

2  Concordance Features for Disambiguating Para-synonyms-3

2.1 Dialects-3

2.2 Style and Formality of the Context-4

2.3 Connotations-5

2.4 Grammatical Patterns-6

2.5 Collocations-6

3 Data Process and Analyses-7

3.1 Data Collection-7

3.2 Results-8

3.2.1 Claim-8

3.2.2 Declare-12

3.2.3 Announce-14

3.3 Analysis of the Results-17

3.3.1 Dialects-17

3.3.2 Style and Formality of the Context-17

3.3.3 Connotations-18

3.3.4 Grammatical Patterns-19

3.3.5 Collocations-21

4 Conclusion-23

References-25