In summary, the present corpus-based study is of great importance not only it will add new findings to the existing descriptions of these target near-synonymous verbs but also offer some advice in learning and teaching synonymous verbs pedagogically。

1。3 Research questions

The present study applies the corpus-based BP approach to find out the distributions both in general and in different registers, internal syntactic and semantic features of a synonymous set。 The specific research questions are as follows:

1。 Are there any differences between imply, indicate, signify, and suggest in their frequency distribution in general or in different registers?

2。 Are there any differences between imply, indicate, signify, and suggest in their syntactic and semantic patterns, especially colligation, semantic preference and prosody?

3。 Are there any pedagogical implications in this present corpus-based BP study?

1。4 Structure of the present study

Combining both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis methods, the present study applies the advanced Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and JustTheWord to distinguish a set of synonyms: imply, indicate, signify, and suggest in the perspectives of register distribution, collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody, aiming to expose the effectiveness of corpus-based method of synonym distinction and offer significant differentiations and distinctions for English teachers and learners。 The paper is pided into five chapters, and the specific structures are as bellow:

Chapter one begins with the introduction, consisting of the research background, significance and aims of the study, research questions involved as well as the structure of the paper。 

Chapter two introduces the theoretical background and reviews the related studies both at home and abroad。 The theoretical background defines the core theories and concepts involved so as to provide solid theoretical support for subsequent research work。

Chapter three focuses on the research methods, the corpus and tool to be used, also the corpus queries and analysis procedures。

Chapter four displays the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the target synonymous set in general usage patterns, typical colligation patterns, collocation and semantic preference and semantic prosody and cross-register usage patterns。

Chapter five is the conclusion, summarizing pedagogical implications, limitations of the present study and further research tendency。 

2。 Literature review

2。1 Theoretical background 

Corpus linguistics, rising in 1980s, is a newly emerging subject, which is specialized in retrieval, analysis and calculation with the advancement of retrieval software in computer science。 Considering the large number of collected "real world" contents, corpus linguistics is an empirical issue essentially。 Based on the reliable linguistic data, corpus linguistics yields systematic and detailed conclusions through observation and generalization which are of great significance to the construction of linguistic theories。 

Since a study could not be convincing with the solid theoretical support, this chapter will introduce and define the core theories and concepts involved in the present study at first。 

2。1。1 Collocation

The concept of collocation originated from Saussure, who believed that language is a system composed of a variety of relations, including the paradigmatic relations and combinational relations。 Although Saussure did not put forward the concept directly, his opinion has been widely accepted by current researchers and laid a solid theoretical foundation for the collocation theory。 It was J。 R。 Firth (1957) who first proposed the concept of “collocation”。 He argued in Papers in Linguistics that a word is known by the company it keeps, that is the meaning of a word can be completely understand only when it is inserted in context。来自优Y尔L论W文Q网wWw.YouERw.com 加QQ7520~18766