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Part of
Current Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse: Global context and diverse perspectives
Edited by Yun Xiao and Linda Tsung
[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse 10] 2019
► pp. 156–176

Chapter 8
Constraints on the collocational behaviors of Chinese near-synonyms

A corpus-based analysis

| University of Dayton

This paper reports a corpus-based study to examine how Chinese near-synonyms choose their typical collocates. Near-synonyms commonly misused by English-speaking learners of Chinese were selected for analysis. Results obtained from the corpora (the Chinese Internet Corpus by the University of Leeds and the Lancaster corpus of Mandarin Chinese) indicate that the collocational behaviors of the selected synonyms are constrained by their own semantic, grammatical, prosodic, stylistic and pragmatic features and hence are explainable to second/foreign learners. Findings of this study will contribute to the design of collocation/synonym dictionary as well as the instruction of collocations as a second/foreign language.

Keywords: collocation, corpus-based study, near-synonyms, L2 vocabulary learning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Selecting near-synonyms for analysis
    • 3.2Identifying typical collocates
    • 3.3Data for the study
  • 4.Constraints on the collocational behaviors of synonyms
    • 4.1Grammatical constraints
    • 4.2Semantic constraints
    • 4.3Prosodic constraints
    • 4.4Stylistic constraints
    • 4.5Pragmatic constraints
  • 5.Discussion and pedagogical implications
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scld.10.08yan
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