A Corpus-Based Genre and Collocational Study of the Near-Synonyms: Grasp, Capture, Seize, Snatch, and Take

Abstract

This study investigated the genre, collocational, and semantic preferences of the near-synonymous English verbs grasp, capture, seize, snatch, and take. The researchers drew data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and three traditional non-corpus-based dictionaries. The results revealed that writers use the verb take much more commonly across all eight genres, with a frequency of 863,996 out of 909,634 total occurrences of all verbs across these genres. Non-formal genres, such as TV/movies and spoken language, show the highest frequencies of the verb take. Additionally, the findings indicate that categorizing their adverb and noun collocates according to semantic preferences provides insights into their co-occurring contextual usage. For instance, the noun collocates of the verb take fall into semantic themes that include responsibility, action, observation/perception, benefits, life, location, and evaluation. In contrast, the verb capture, which has the second highest frequency, is associated with semantic themes such as visual representation, abstract concepts, data, focus, force, and body parts. The third most frequent verb, grasp, has semantic themes related to body parts, abstract concepts, physical objects, mental attributes, and opportunity. These findings could help ESL/EFL teachers design lessons that focus on genre-specific language use. For instance, ESL learners could develop their ability to identify verb preferences across various genres. Additionally, COCA is freely accessible online. Teachers could engage students in task-based learning. For example, they can ask students to generate a collocational distribution list of a set of near-synonyms and then ask group the semantic preferences of the target synonyms. The students could find subtle differences between the synonyms. Ultimately, this awareness could also improve their linguistic competence.