Actually, Genuinely, Really, and Truly

Abstract

Using the 400+ million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as data and a behavioral profile analysis approach, this study examines the semantic and usage differences among actually, genuinely, really, and truly, four near-synonymous adverbs notorious for their complex functional and syntactic usage patterns. In addition to examining the collocates of the adverbs (i.e. the common types of adjectives/verbs they each modify), the study also investigated the positions the adverbs typically occupy in the sentence structure and their functional implications. The data analysis yields an informative delineation of the internal semantic structure of the synonym set, which includes some interesting new findings compared with existing descriptions of the adverbs. The results also show the need for the BP approach to go beyond collocational analysis in the study of synonymous adverbs. Finally, the study also demonstrates the viability of a corpus-based BP approach in the study of synonymous adverbs.

A corpus study on identification and semantic classification of light verb constructions in Persian: the case of the light verb xordan ‘to eat/collide’

“…The successful application of behavioral profile analysis in several synonymy and polysemy studies (e.g. Gries, 2006Gries, , 2010Gries and Divjak, 2009;Gries and Otani, 2010;Liu and Espino, 2012) would make it an appropriate method to address the problem at hand assuming that various senses of a given LV in Persian form polysemy networks.…”

Why Do Word Blends with Near-Synonymous Composites Exist and Persist? The Case of Guesstimate, Chillax, Ginormous and Confuzzled

“…Many studies (Divjak, 2006;Divjak & Gries, 2006;Gries & Otani, 2010;Liu, 2010;Liu & Espino, 2012) have used corpus-based behavioural profi les, or similar techniques, to determine how semantics can diff er between synonymous words. As such methods cannot easily explore other factors, e.g.…”

Using Corpora to Help Teach Difficult-to-distinguish English Words

“…In other words, the BP analysis helps provide valuable information that we may not be able to obtain otherwise. Since Hanks' study, there have been quite a few sophistic따ed BP studies of s"1onymous verbs (e.g., Divjak & G디es, 2006) and adjectives (Gries & Otani, 2010;Liu, 2010a), as well as a couple on nouns (Janda & Solovyev, 2009;Liu, 2013) and one on adverbs (Liu & Espino, 2012).…”