Multiword Units and Synonymy: Interface between Collocations, Colligations, and Semantic Prosody

Appropriate use of near-synonyms in English often poses difficulty for learners. This study aims to compare and contrast the predict foresee , focusing on genres, collocations, colligations, semantic prosody which specifically characterize each synonymous verb. The consulted Corpus Contemporary American (COCA), i.e. largest corpus representing (Davies, 2020), distribution target synonyms across genres top-20 noun collocates MI-score is 3 or above. total frequency far higher than that . Of all eight COCA, most common academic texts, whereas highest number occurrences found webpages. Interestingly, both are not characteristic colloquial as their frequencies speaking, fiction, TV movie subtitles relatively low. data from COCA also reveal verbs written English, with being frequency. Although sharing certain object collocates, it indicated through prosody, adjacent surrounding lexical items, associated negative connotations, while does primarily express adversity. As other, words share colligational patterns. However, two corpus-informed syntactic structures, + somebody V.ing to-infinitive clearly distinguish between verb synonyms. It concluded rather absolute since they differ connotations collocational/colligational