With this principle, Harley (2006) thinks, strict synonyms are extremely rare while the other type of synonyms is more common. Loose synonyms are the words which have similar meaning in certain context; however, with the differences of combinations and contexts, they may have very disparate connotations (Jackson & Amvela, 2007). These theories of relational meanings of words are applied and applied by many scholars such as Phoocharoensil (2010) who researched on English synonyms ask, beg, plead, request and appeal. He examined these five words, which has highly similar meaning of trying to acquire things from others, are of great variation in dialects, connotation and syntactic usage. Meanwhile, the study of Liu (n. d.) on verbs of doubt also found same result in 猜 and 怀疑. Therefore, it is more than reasonable to conclude that synonyms used in very different part of sentences can result in certain differences of connotations.
Methodology.
As mentioned in the Introduction, this research essay examines synonyms to identify the similarity and differences in them. To conduct the research systematically, the three steps of corpus-based research suggested by Dalbera (n.d.; Kawaguchi et al, 2007) are adopted, which are:.
1. Understanding the background and knowledge of research objects.
2. Using suitable tool to collect reliable data.
3. Discussing the findings and acknowledge possible flaws in the analysis.
At the first stage of research, certain numbers of readings are done to create a clear understanding of the definition and past study of synonyms. At the same time, with the reference of Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary 3rd Edition (2008), claim and state are chosen as the study objects. In the verb form, they are a pair of synonyms frequently used to describe the motion of expressing opinions (CALD, 2008). Then, to systematically examine the data of this pair of words, an online corpus, British National Corpus (BNC), is employed.
