“A whole new world… wait, is it a whole, entire, or total world?” : the extraction of collocations for the three English synonym discrimination
This study investigated three synonymous adjectives, ‘whole’, ‘entire’, and ‘total’, in terms of their collocations and strict sense of meaning. Data were drawn from three English dictionaries: 1) Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (online version), 2) Merriam-Webster's Learner's...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2022
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/20091/1/47958-187247-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/20091/ https://ejournal.ukm.my/3l/issue/view/1526 |
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| Summary: | This study investigated three synonymous adjectives, ‘whole’, ‘entire’, and ‘total’, in terms of their collocations and
strict sense of meaning. Data were drawn from three English dictionaries: 1) Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
(online version), 2) Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary (online version), and 3) Longman Dictionary of
Contemporary English (2014), and from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings from
this investigation revealed that the three adjectives share some common meanings, and they can thus be considered
near synonyms. They may also be somehow interchangeable with each other in certain contexts, however, in terms of
formality, the word ‘total’ is likely to be used the most in formal contexts. Concerning their common collocations,
‘whole’ and ‘entire’ share some noun collocates, some of which are associated with geographic vocabulary; namely
America, Europe, and California. However, ‘entire’ and ‘total’ share only one strong noun collocate, which is
population, while ‘whole’ and ‘total’ do not share any typical noun collocates. Significantly, corpus data can provide
additional data which does not exist in dictionaries. The findings of this study may serve as supplementary materials
for English language teachers to enhance students’ English vocabulary learning, especially when it comes to
academic writing. |
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