A Genre and Collocational Analysis of Consequence, Result, and Outcome

Abstract

This corpus-based study examines genres and collocation patterns in which the three synonyms 'consequence', 'result', and 'outcome' usually occur. The data on which the study is based is derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Of all the eight genres currently available in COCA, the three synonyms appear with the highest frequency in academic texts, whereas frequencies are lowest in informal genres, i.e. TV and movie subtitles and fiction. Of pedagogical concern is the fact that the common verb and adjective collocates repeatedly co-occur with the synonymous nouns. Determined by the COCA frequency and the MI value (≥ 3), 'consequence' is often used with verbs and adjectives conveying negative senses, and the typical collocates of 'result' has a clear association with research-oriented contexts. The collocates of 'outcome' have the broadest variety of semantic properties but are not directly related to any specific contexts. It is highly recommended that EFL teachers apply this genre and collocational information to synonym development lessons.

Semantic prosody and collocation: A corpus study of the near-synonyms persist and persevere

“…Such dependence on both the collocational patterns and the prosodic behavior of persist and persevere allows for greater possibilities of discriminating the two near-synonyms effectively, which are consistent with previous studies in that near-synonyms, despite some overlap in core meaning, tend to co-select particularly different sets of synonyms (e.g. Crawford & Csomay, 2016;Jirananthiporn, 2018;Partington, 1998Partington, , 2004Phoocharoensil, 2020;Selmistraitis, 2020). In this study, persist is more like to appear with lexical items denoting negative meanings, whereas persevere strongly collocates with Christianity-oriented vocabulary and lexical items related to difficulties and determination.…”

“…Another limitation deals with the statistics. As the current study relies on the total frequency and the MI score, the extracted collocates can be different if other statistical tests, e.g., T-score, Z-score, log-likelihood, are applied in further studies to measure the strength of collocational association (Phoocharoensil, 2020).…”

“…A number of studies have shown that near-synonyms differ in many aspects, including degree of formality (e.g., Jirananthiporn, 2018;Petcharat & Phoocharoensil, 2017), connotations (e.g., Partington, 1998;Stubbs, 1995), collocations (e.g., Crawford and Csomay, 2016;Jirananthiporn, 2018;Phoocharoensil, 2010Phoocharoensil, , 2020, semantic prosody (e.g., Nelson, 2006;Partington, 1998Partington, , 2004Selmistraitis, 2020), and grammatical patterns (e.g., Phoocharoensil, 2010).…”

“A Whole New World… Wait, Is It a Whole, Entire, or Total World?”: The Extraction of Collocations for the Three English Synonym Discrimination

“…For the second research question, in particular, noun collocates frequently co-occurring with the three synonymous adjectives were explored. In this stage, the MI value or score, which regulates "the chance of two words co-occurring in consideration of their frequencies in cooccurring with all the others in the corpus", was used to quantify the collocational strength so as to select typical collocates (Lui & Lei, 2018, p. 6;Phoocharoensil, 2020). However, it should be noted that the MI value has some limitations.…”

Examining Co-activation Through Cross-Linguistic Influence among Bilinguals in Spoken Language Processing: Evidence from Eye Movements

“…Additionally, the current state of the bilingualism literature has been surrounded with controversy due to mixed results that bilingualism has on cognition including language processing which has been attributed to the many individual differences (Supakorn, 2020;Valian, 2015;Fricke, Zirnstein, Navarro-Torress, & Kroll, 2018). One such individual difference that requires attention is the Age of Acquisition (AoA).…”