What Can Near Synonyms Tell Us

This study examines near synonyms and tries to extract the contrasts that dictate their semantic and associated syntactic behaviors. A near synonym pair of Chinese verbs, fangbian and bianli, which mean ‘to be convenient’, is under examination. Corpus data reveal some important but opaque distributional differences between this synonym pair that are hard to be recognized solely by intuition. This study demonstrates how the corpus data can be a useful tool that helps understanding the interaction between syntax and semantics.