Lexical Acquisition Viewed from a Contrastive Analysis of Collocational Behavior of Near Synonyms

This paper makes a contrastive analysis of the collocational features of cause and lead to in SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners) and BNC by using the collocational study methods of corpus linguistics. In this research, first, the semantic prosody distribution of the near synonyms in two corpora were investigated; second, by defining minimum frequency (≥5) and MI score(≥3), the collocates of the synonyms were computed and listed in the order of frequency, and then a comparison was made between collocational features of cause and lead to in two corpora. The data showed that English-major learners demonstrated similar semantic preferences with the native speakers, but that there were still great differences in their underlying collocational patterns. The English-major learners seemed to have acquired the semantic features of the near synonyms, but far more efforts need to be made to improve the depth and breadth of their lexis. This paper also discussed the implications for language teaching.