However, the appreciable meanings semantic prosody describes goes much beyond the single word, which is often invisible to the naked eye。 But the functional corpus makes up for the sensory defect effectively, thanks to its authentic and abundant data。

2。2 Related researches both at home and abroad

Synonymy is an extraordinarily significant lexical category which helps us in expressing our ideas and feelings more effectively and precisely in communication。 However, synonyms or near-synonyms are not indiscriminately interchangeable, due to the majority of them generally express the same meaning in various ways, under perse contexts, and from different perspectives。 Comprehending synonyms correctly and using synonyms appropriately is so important for English learners that the study of synonymy has to be taken notice of。 

With the development of corpus linguistics, corpus indexing method provides a new perspective for synonymy study, given its rich and authentic instances and contents, so that learners can perceive and master the subtle semantic and pragmatic differences between synonyms。 Scholars both at home and abroad have made use of corpora to distinguish different types of synonymous sets (e。g。 synonymous verbs and nouns) from the multi-angle and multi-layer。

2。2。1 Related researches abroad

In the early 1960s, N。 Francis and H。 Kucera designed the first generation of a large-scale electronic corpus, which is the prototype of the Brown corpus。 Up to now, the development of corpus linguistics aboard has undergone 50 years, and the remarkable research results will be displayed as bellow:

(I) The corpus-based studies of verbs abroad

Basing on the British National Spoken Corpus (BNSC), Rundell (1992) compared the frequency of began with started both in spoken and written registers。 The study showed that the frequency of began in written language is almost twice than started, while in spoken English it is much lower than started。 Following this study, Biber et al。 (1999) focused on the complements of these two verbs, revealing the semantic differences more precisely。 Beside for the studies of semantic differences, Alrens also touched on the syntactic and distributional patterns by differentiating between worry and bother, and verified the feasibility of corpus in distinguishing the subtle semantic nuance。

However, there is no rounded delineation of syntactic or semantic structure of verbs until the appearance of behavioral profile approach。 Further developed Firth, Halliday and Sinclair’ s theories, Church et al。 (1994) conducted a “lexical substitutability” test in a corpus research of ask for, request, and demand, and argued that the “textual substitutability” of lexical items under the same context denotes their semantic similarity。 This evidence together with the intimate interrelation between lexical semantics and distribution patterns laid solid foundations for the corpus-based BP studies of lexical issues in the late 1990s。 

Basing largely on the theoretical tradition first put forward by Firth (1957), Hanks (1996) conducted one of the first corpus-based BP studies, in which he disambiguated a synonymous set (urge, incite, bother, and abandon) with the help of the British National Corpus (BNC) data。 He examined the syntactic and collocational patterns of the target two verbs urge and incite (e。g。 the types of subjects and the complement the two verbs customarily carry), the semantic patterns of the complements they modify as well as the frequency the various patterns hold。 The acquired BP information opens doors to explain meanings of each verb and indentify them from its synonyms。 However, it did not touch upon a set of synonyms, which is more interesting and complex。文献综述

Following Hanks’ study, Divjak (2006) and Divjak & Gries (2006) each has conducted a more sophisticated corpus-based BP study of Russian synonymous set, examining the tense, aspect, the types of complements (i。e。 their modified nouns) and clause types among the target verbs。 This study objectively pointed out the fine-grained semantic nuance, upon which traditional research methods can hardly touch。