Result, Effect, Consequence and Outcome: The collocations and discourse prosodies associated with four synonyms

This paper reports on a corpus-based study of four synonyms: result, effect, consequence, and outcome. The study was undertaken with the aim of describing the differences among these lexical items in terms of their meaning, especially their tendencies regarding discourse prosody. The New Oxford Thesaurus of English (2000) lists result, effect, consequence and outcome as synonyms of one another and in many cases they can be used interchangeably. Yet there are differences in usage; some differences are intuitively obvious, but there are other, more subtle differences which may not be apparent intuitively, but which can be discerned through analysis of the words’ occurrence in a large corpus of texts. 2.0 Related studies and aims of the present study The motivation for the present study arises in part from a study by Stubbs (1995) on the lemma CAUSE. From an analysis of 38,000 occurrences of noun and verb forms of CAUSE, Stubbs was able to conclude that CAUSE is overwhelmingly associated with negative things. This could be seen from the most frequently occurring collocates of CAUSE. They included, for example, abandonment, accident, alarm, anger, annoyance, antagonism, anxiety, apathy, apprehension, breakage and many more with negative or unpleasant connotations. (There were a few exceptional cases in which CAUSE was used in the sense of ‘aim’ or ‘principle’ as in the expression, a good cause.) On the other hand, forms of PROVIDE are generally used in connection with good things. This tendency of some lexical items to be associated with certain speaker attitudes has been termed ‘discourse prosody’ (Stubbs 2002) or ‘semantic prosodies’ (Sinclair 1996). Result is listed as the opposite of cause in The New Oxford Thesaurus of English (2000: 812), and I was interested to see if negative discourse prosody was associated with result and synonyms of result. I selected three synonyms which seemed close to result in having a general meaning, and which also had relatively high frequencies in COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English. This research follows a similarly designed study of near-synonyms by Liu (2010). (Liu uses the term near-synonym to highlight the fact that no two words are complete synonyms in the sense of being