A Corpus-Based Approach to Distinguishing the Near-Synonyms Listen and Hear

Abstract

The present study aimed to compare the verbs listen (to) and hear based on lexical resources and corpora, including (a) WordNet, which contains sense frequency information taken from the Brown Corpus and The Red Badge of Courage; (b) the British National Corpus (BNC); and (c) a writing task for English learners that focused on the uses of listen (to) and hear. The two verbs were compared in terms of sense frequency distributions as well as collocational information. Similarities and differences between the uses of the verbs listen (to) and hear were also analyzed using Sketch Engine, a lexical resource that enables collocational patterns from the BNC to be displayed according to grammatical relations. In the writing task, it was found that, for both verbs, students focused on a certain meaning. In addition, the BNC showed different sense distributions compared with WordNet and the learner data, as well as more figurative meanings. Both learner data and WordNet were predominant in the use of literal meanings for both verbs. This study contributes to the practice of connecting corpus data to teaching and learning.