A corpus analysis of collocational behaviors of near-synonymous adjectives

Abstract

The present study explored the collocational behaviors of the two near-synonymous adjectives, wide and broad using a corpus analysis. The study examined similarities and differences of the two adjectives in terms of their overall usage patterns, semantic preferences, semantic prosodies, and nominal collocates. From the comparison of their collocational patterns, the study found that in terms of overall usage patterns, wide was more frequently used in the entire corpus and across all the genres. Wide was most frequently used in the genre of Magazine while broad was preferred in the Academic genre. Regarding semantic preference and semantic prosody, broad displayed more varied semantic preferences than wide, even though they both had neutral semantic prosody. Likewise, while the two adjectives shared many collocates, their collocational patterns were found to be different. It can be inferred from these findings that broad seems to have more diverse semantic usage than wide, even though they are seemingly similar and interchangeable. This implies that classroom teachers should help students develop an awareness of the differences in the usage and meaning of such synonyms and learn how to differentiate them.