Abstract

Corpus-based approach, a new research method in modern linguistics, has been more and more widely employed in language researches of various fields and perspectives since the flourishing of computer technology and the appearing of a great amount of large-scale and well-designed corpora and concordance software. In order to discriminate among the synonyms of anger, rage, fury, indignation, wrath, resentment, and shed some light on the learning and using of synonyms, British National Corpus(BNC), an on-line research platform was based on to make a discussion of differences in the meanings, commonly used premodifiers, and grammatical structures among these words. It has been discovered that the linguistic information from 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 not existent 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. Also, attempt is done to bring about some innovations in vocabulary teaching approaches, that is, to offer both language teachers and learners a brand-new method of synonym differentiation, which may effectively stimulate the motivations of students, and further improve their ability of analyzing and solving problems.

Key words: corpus; college English synonyms; English synonym teaching

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1.Introduction..1

2. Literature Review2

3.Corpus-based Study of English Synonyms.3

3.2 Definition of synonyms-4

3.3Strict and loose synonyms-5

3.4 Reasons for choosing corpus-based approach-6

4. Analysis of the Corpus-based Synonyms and Application to the Teaching Methodology.7

4.1 Data Collection for Corpus-based Study of English Synonyms-7

4.2 Analysis of anger, rage, fury, indignant, wrath, resentment-7

4.3 Application to the teaching methodology-11

5. Conclusion11

Works Cited.13