Introduction

The objective of this thesis is to examine how corpus linguistics can be used in the study of synonymous words or expressions. The main issue is to point out how a corpus can be useful for analysing language. To achieve this purpose, the first problem to be dealt with is the semantic analysis of the following lexical items: happen, befall, occur, take place, eventuate, fall, pass and go on. The previous seven verbs are all among the thirty-six synonyms of happen listed in Roget’s Thesaurus Dictionary. These verbs of happening are often involved in course-books of different levels of English, and are acquired at an early stage in the second language acquisition process. According to the Dictionary of Hungarian and English Synonyms frequently used by language learners, these words are regarded as the synonyms of the verb happen as all of them belong to the same semantic field (2000, p. 219).

Although this semantic field is very broad, it is not a problem for the native speaker to choose the appropriate word in a given context. However, when using English as a foreign language, the lexical choice of the right item is not so obvious. The learner of the language can turn to dictionaries that provide some information about the selected lexical item. However, the appropriate contextual use of the word in question often remains unclear. In other cases language learners can also turn to a native speaker for advice, and at intermediate or advanced level of English they can check the chosen lexical item through the representative set of concordances from corpora. The concordance lines used in the analysis were gained from the British National Corpus (BNC).

The aim of the first chapter is to offer a theoretical background of synonymy. The first point to be considered is to present different approaches describing the nature of synonymy. The following section deals with the classification of the different types of synonyms.

The second chapter is about the analysis of happen and its synonyms based on the study of five dictionaries. The names of the dictionaries will be specified in this section and the relevant information about the lexical items found in them will also be presented there.

The third chapter contains the definitions of important terms. Different theories on corpus linguistics, corpus-based approach, keywords and collocations will be described there. The fundamental aim is to draw attention to the role of corpora in language teaching and in pedagogy as such. Besides, the different types of corpora will be identified and classified. In the last section the BNC used in the corpus-based analysis is introduced.

The fourth chapter is focused on the corpus-based analysis of the verb happen and its synonyms. The selected words were studied through the chosen representative set of concordances from the BNC. The following step of the research was to compare the data gained from the dictionaries and the BNC.

Finally, the conclusion summarises the main points of the thesis. The further intention is to draw a conclusion based on the results of the study regarding the dictionaries and the BNC. Particular attention is paid to how a corpus-based analysis can provide the information the dictionaries do not contain on some specific lexical items. A corpus gives a more detailed picture about a word by presenting it in its natural occurrences in various texts, showing its collocations, frequency, and phraseology.

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