A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Adjectives and Synonyms -Beautiful, Handsome, and Pretty

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the three synonyms beautiful, handsome and pretty in terms of their meanings and collocation with the help of the Longman Dictionary of contemporary English 6th edition (2014) and the British National Corpus (BNC). Only 100 concordance lines of each synonyms were selected from the corpora. This study was also aimed at investigating the similarities and differences between the three synonyms. The findings of this research declare that these synonyms are similar in their core meaning but are different in their detailed meanings and collocation. The results also clarifies that corpus provide more additional information that is not the part of dictionaries. It is also clear from the study that synonyms cannot be used in all the contexts alternately. Moreover, this study states that corpus is more helpful for the teachers of English as well as for second language learners (L2) because it gives additional information regarding any set of synonyms than dictionaries give. The teachers as well as students should be guided that they may get additional information about data from corpus than the dictionaries. As a result the students will be able in differentiating synonyms in a set by using both the resources, Learners Dictionaries and corpora, and in this way they will be able to increase their vocabulary.