vol 25 no2,2025

A Corpus-Based Approach Towards Investigating the Collocations of The Synonymous Nouns Problem, Difficulty and Trouble

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A Corpus-Based Approach Towards Investigating the Collocations of The Synonymous Nouns Problem, Difficulty and Trouble

Abstract:

This paper investigates the concordances of synonymous nouns (problem, difficulty and trouble) to discover their collocational behaviour in the British National Corpus (BNC) based on identifying their syntactic and semantic patterns. Considering the collocates of such semantically related nouns can be a plausible and significant way for EFL learners as collocations can show how two words or more are frequently used in a text. Learning how collocations are formed is a complicated process for learners as they lack the knowledge to understand how collocations are formed. The current study therefore considers the linguistic features used to form collocations, without relying intensively on the arbitrary use of collocate. This indicates that learners still need an explanation to understand how a set of combinations are formed based on studying their linguistic features such as semantic usage, phraseological combinations and semantic prosody, without relying too much on dictionaries as they only provide the word meanings with examples that do not explain the different uses and meanings of their synonyms. The data results display how some collocations are not formed arbitrarily; they are associated with fixed word combinations that contribute to explaining the collocational behaviour of collocates. The study shows that linguistic features are required to ease the process of learning collocations. These include the grammatical and semantic characteristics of each collocate to establish the accurate use of collocations.

Keywords: collocation, synonymy, corpus, concordance, arbitrary.

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