Sunday, June 10, 2007

Abstract

This thesis discusses the problem of synonymy. Whereas the selection of the correct lexical item is clear for the native speaker, foreign language speakers can experience uncertainties in terms of when and how certain words and expressions should be applied. In these cases one can ask a native speaker for advice or turn to dictionaries. Mostly general monolingual dictionaries do not overlap the differences between synonymous lexical items in terms of meaning or usage; that is why most of the doubts regarding lexical choice remain problems for the user of the language. For justifying this issue, the thesis focuses on the study of a group of synonymous words on the basis of five monolingual dictionaries. The lexical items studied are happen and its synonyms. In the further step of the analysis, a representative set of concordances was selected from the British National Corpus, and a corpus-based analysis of the lexical items was carried out. With the help of the corpus, a more detailed and lively picture has been obtained about happen and its synonyms and their semantic overlap.

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