ERIC Number: EJ1283247
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: 28
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1513–5934
EISSN: N/A
A Corpus-Based Study of English Synonyms: Chance and Opportunity
Jarunwaraphan, Boonrak; Mallikamas, Prima
rEFLections, v27 n2 p218-245 Jul-Dec 2020
The study aims to investigate differences and similarities of two synonymous nouns, chance and opportunity. The sources of data were from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and online dictionaries. The study applied both quantitative and qualitative methodology. Throughout the five text types of COCA (i.e. spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals), opportunity was used most frequently in academic texts and was found least often in fiction. On the other hand, chance occurred least in the genre of academic texts and most often in the spoken genre. The claim that opportunity tends to be used more often in formal style than its near synonym was supported by a number of academic words in the list of its collocates. Although a wider range of meanings of chance reflects its polysemous status, chance and its collocates have fewer semantic preferences than those of opportunity. The findings also suggest that near-synonyms may behave differently in terms of collocation and semantic prosody although they share similar meanings.
Descriptors: Computational Linguistics, North American English, Dictionaries, Electronic Publishing, Academic Language, Semantics, Intonation, Suprasegmentals, Nouns, Speech Communication, Phrase Structure, Preferences, Definitions, Language Usage, Comparative Analysis, English for Special Purposes, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A