Conclusion

The first point of the thesis was to provide some different approaches of the theory of synonymy, and based on these linguistic investigations to prove that the group of words have been studied belongs to this category. The following step of the analysis was to study these lexical items on the basis of five different monolingual dictionaries. The objective was to establish what information the dictionaries provide about each lexical item. The second chapter presented the results of the research regarding the dictionaries. It was followed by the introduction of some significant terms in the field of corpus linguistics. The final step of the study was a corpus-based analysis of the lexical items on the basis of the random selections of the concordance lines gained from the British National Corpus. The output of the linguistic corpus-based investigations was described in the fourth chapter. The results detailed in the previous section indicate the significance of using a corpus over monolingual dictionaries to conduct the analysis of lexical items such as happen and its synonyms. The difference seems to be more remarkable in the case of the items (befall, eventuate, etc) that are less frequent to occur in the language.

As Teubert emphasises, in today’s world the corpus proves to be the most useful and effective device for studying a language, carrying out a linguistic analysis and has a wide application in various fields of linguistics: “Today the corpus is considered the default resource for almost anyone working in linguistics. No introspection can claim credence without verification through real language data. Corpus research has become a key element of almost all language studies. This is an indication that the paradigm of linguistics is finally becoming again more pluralistic” (2005, p. 1).

From the point of view of studying happen and its synonyms, lexical items such as appear, arise, arrive, become of, be found, betide, bump, chance, come about, come after, come off, crop up, develop, down, ensue, follow, hit, issue, light, luck, materialize, meet, present itself, proceed, recur, result, shake, smoke, spring, stumble, stumble upon, supervene, take effect, transpire, turn out, turn up and what goes could be analysed in the corpus as other synonym forms of happen. These lexical items are all listed in the Roget’s Thesaurus Dictionary as synonyms of happen. Besides, a corpus-based analysis of happen and its synonyms could be carried out in order to establish the frequency of their usage in the language. Setting up a frequency list by students could be useful to see which lexical items are used in spoken or informal language, and which are the ones that are neglected in everyday English and restricted to formal language. These investigations remain the research questions of further studies regarding happen and its synonyms.

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