A Corpus-based Study on Two Near-synonymous Verbs in Academic Journals: PROPOSE and SUGGEST.

Abstract

While substantial corpus-based studies have been performed on near synonyms in general texts from a wide variety of spoken and written languages, there have been few attempts to explore synonymous words in a specific genre. Using the subcorpus of academic writing in the 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the source data, this study is aimed at examining the syntactic and semantic environments of two frequent near-synonymous verbs, PROPOSE and SUGGEST, from three aspects: (i) frequency patterns, (ii) subject animacy, and (iii) the grammatical features of four verb forms. Hierarchical configural frequency analysis (HCFA) was employed to reveal the significant combinations of the interactions among these three factors. The major findings showed that the two verbs were somewhat similar in terms of preferred patterns; however, the distributions of their frequent animate/inanimate subjects and the grammatical features of the top patterns were different. This research will be beneficial in raising students’ awareness of the recurrent phraseologies in academic written discourse since it provides a systematic delineation of the different habitual collocations and syntactic constructions of two frequent and similar verbs in research articles.

截至目前為止, 已有許多語料庫為本之研究著眼於近義詞在一般口語和書寫語中的表現, 但探究其在特定文類中的使用狀況相關研究卻十分稀少。本研究分析了收錄於美國當代英語語料庫中的學術寫作語料, 檢視兩個高頻率近義動詞提議和建議經常出現的語法與語義環境, 所聚焦的三個面向如下:(1)常與兩動詞一同出現的高頻模式;(2)主詞的生物性;(3)影響動詞型態的語法特徵。我們運用分層結構頻率分析法找出了此三個面向中的多個重要組合, 研究結果顯示這兩個動詞偏好的模式十分類似, 然而常與它們共現的(不)具生命性的主詞和最高頻模式的語法特徵卻不盡相同。本研究將能提升學生對學術寫作中常見措詞用語的覺察, 因為它針對兩個高頻的近義動詞在研究文章中所習慣共現的搭配詞和句式結構提供了系統化的描述與解說。.