Semantic Prosody and Collocation: A Corpus Study of the Near-Synonyms "Persist" and "Persevere"

Autor/in	Phoocharoensil, Supakorn
Titel	Semantic Prosody and Collocation: A Corpus Study of the Near-Synonyms "Persist" and "Persevere"
Quelle	In: Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7 (2021) 1, S.240-258 (19 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Phoocharoensil, Supakorn)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	2149-1135
Schlagwörter	Semantics; Intonation; Suprasegmentals; Phrase Structure; Computational Linguistics; North American English; Verbs; Language Styles; Definitions; Dictionaries; Language Usage; Grammar; Vocabulary Development; Language Patterns + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Semantik; Phrasenstruktur; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; Amerikanisches Englisch; Sprachstil; Begriffsbestimmung; Dictionary; Wörterbuch; Sprachgebrauch; Grammatik; Wortschatzarbeit; Sprachmodell; Sprachstruktur
Abstract	Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, reveal that "persist" and "persevere" occur with the highest frequency in academic texts and webpages, respectively. Despite similarities in cognitive meanings, the two synonyms co-select different sets of collocations. An analysis of the semantic prosody suggests that while "persist" tends to co-occur with words or phrases that express negative meanings related to continual unpleasant situations, the co-occurring lexical items around "persevere" denote strong determination and great effort in completing a difficult task. Moreover, although it is stated in a learner dictionary that "persevere" is used only as an intransitive verb, corpus evidence proves that this verb can also be used transitively. It is recommended that corpus data be incorporated in vocabulary instruction, alongside learner dictionaries, the former of which can provide more authentic linguistic information on collocational and grammatical patterns. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics. Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Anafartalar Campus Faculty of Education Department of Foreign Language Education, Canakkale 07100, Turkey. e-mail: editor@ejal.info; Website: https://www.ejal.info/index.php/ejal
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01