English is general considered to be the global language, a lingua franca, in terms of the population and widespread of its users. According to The World Factbook (2009), researched by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of USA, English is accepted as the official language in approximately 60 countries and regions. With the wide range of use in the world and its long history, English borrowed certain amount of vocabulary from other languages. As a result, an extremely common language feature can be detected in the large amount of English words which is synonyms. Synonyms are pairs of words sharing similar meaning or semantic features (Jackson & Amvela, 2007). Nevertheless, as recognized by many linguists, the meaning of synonyms differs for their connotations, dialects, collocations and syntactic features. In this research essay, a corpus-based study on the similarities and differences of synonyms will be conducted by examining claim and state. The essay will be divided into three parts, which are Literature Review, Methodology and Findings and Results. After that, a conclusion will be drawn as the summary and revision.
Literature Review.
Synonym is considered to be an important part of the semantic study which focuses on the relational meanings of lexis. It is generally agreed that the meanings of words are closely related to the collocations and contexts in the sentences. Also, as mentioned in the introduction, synonyms are referring to the words which "have same meaning in some or all contexts" (Fromkin, Rodman & Hyams, 2011). This is according with the definition of synonyms made by Jackson and Amvela (2007). They believe that synonyms can be classified into strict and loose synonyms basing on the character of interchangeable use of vocabulary. To be clearer, strict synonyms are the words can be replaced by each other with no change in all contexts such as meanings, collocations, connotations and grammatical patterns.