A Corpus-based Analysis of “Create” and “Produce”

Abstract

This paper examines the synonymous pair ‘create’ and ‘produce’ in English and suggests that their similarities and differences can be elucidated based on the types of products denoted by their objects. PRODUCTS, as part of the eventive information of ACTIVITY, are sometimes shared by both verbs (e.g., in ‘Manufacture’), while some other products (e.g., ‘Farming’) are found only in one of the verbs (‘produce’). In addition, a gradience analysis of ‘property,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘quantity,’ and ‘concreteness’ is also postulated, as these semantic features help to decide the selection between ‘create’ and ‘produce.’ Two corpora – the Brown Corpus and the Frown Corpus (from ICAME) – provided the data for this paper, and their results were compared to the British National Corpus through the collocation application of the Sketch Engine. Finally, the similarities and differences between the compared words are represented by means of a hierarchical structure.