A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Near-synonyms in COCA： taking pandemic andepidemic as examples

叢飛飏

◆Abstract：As the corpus linguistics developed fast and various corpora have established， the corpus-based behavior description method is a well-used scientific and effective method in all kinds of linguistic research. Based on the Contemporary American Corpus （COCA）， the synonymous verbs "epidemic" and "pandemic" are distinguished from semantic prosody and collocation， and their regular usage and statistics are sorted out， so English learners can have a good grasp of synonyms related to the corona virus.

◆Key words ：COCA; collocation; semantic prosody; near synonyms

1 Introduction

Since the establishment of Brown Corpus， corpus linguistics has developed rapidly. The application of corpus has opened up a new world for foreign language research. It uses a large number of real and rich corpus as the research object， combined with computer programs with powerful ability to reorganize language data to conduct multilevel and all-round research， revealing implicit language laws and language features. During the epidemic period， many English related students and workers will be contacted with epidemic-related medical vocabularies. It adopts the corpus linguistics， takes the comparative analysis of English near-synonyms "epidemic" and "pandemic" as a focused study， and discusses how to distinguish English synonyms from word frequency and vocabulary collocation.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Collocation

Collocation refers to a group of two or more words that usually go together. A good way to think of collocation is to look at the word collocation. Co - meaning together - location - meaning place. Here are some examples of common collocations that you might know： make tea- I made a cup of tea for lunch.

2.2Semantic prosody

Semantic prosody is a significant main topic which has emerged in corpus linguistics during the last decades and it can be divided into three categories： as positive， neutral and negative. Negative semantic rhyme means that keywords attract almost all terms with strong negative semantic features. While positive semantic prosody means that almost all of the terms attracted by keywords have positive semantic characteristics， thus forming an obvious positive semantic atmosphere.

3 Research Methodology

At present， corpus linguistics has achieved continuous and in-depth development. The corpus provides powerful data with "naturalness" and "authenticity". Corpus Linguistics has a great contribution to language teaching and research. The specific analysis process is as follows. First， in the COCA corpus "collocate" （collocation） function item， use epidemic and pandemic as node words respectively， set the collocation part of speech as noun， and extract the collocation words within the span of ±4 （4 words before and after the node word） and sorted by frequency. Secondly， remove the parts that do not meet the requirements， analyze the semantic prosody and collocation of the two words， and summarize the results.

4 Results and Discussion

4.1 Semantic Prosody of “pandemic” and “epidemic” in COCA

Therefore， semantic prosody is the basis for the formation of connotative meaning， and connotative meaning is the result of the development of semantic prosody. It may be said that semantic rhyme is the implicit connotative meaning， and the connotative meaning is the explicit semantic rhyme.

5 Conclusion

Use the corpus-specific contextual co-occurrence examples could get rid of the neglected language of "only see the trees but not the forest". COCA could also guide learners out of the shackles of traditional vocabulary teaching， encourage them to use corpus for bottom-up and inductive learning， learn through discovery， and cultivate the ability of autonomous learning and lifelong learning. Also， the study found that COCA is a large-scale online and freely available corpus for everyone to use， providing a good platform for English researchers and learners to share American English resources. Experiential learning advocated by experiential philosophy has laid a solid foundation of cognitive philosophy for corpus linguistics， therefore， compared with memorizing the roots in a dictionary every day， such vocabulary learning is more vivid and interesting and can be absorbed by learners.

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