A Corpus—Driven Study of Synonyms—Provide and Offer

韩晓霞

Studies of synonyms has always been an important part of language learning.With the introduction of corpus linguistics，corpus has been put into language studying in many new fields.This paper adopts the corpus-driven approach to investigate the semantic prosody （SP） of provide and offer in Commercial English.The analyses of them will be driven by hard data.After analyzing the typological differences among the written texts，three written texts pertinent to commercial affairs are chosen to build up a sub-corpus from BNCweb.

1 Synonyms Chosen

Provide and offer have the similar meaning “to give someone something that they need” in Cambridge Dictionary.What are the different usages of them in Commercial English is considered.Given that offer has both verb and noun forms，this paper focus mainly on the verb forms.

2 Analysis

2.1 Collocation Compared

J.R.Firth （1975） argued that structures in language shouldnt be studied in isolation but rather in reference to the meanings which they convey.Thus，the analysis of the collocation is pivotal in synonyms study.MI is adopt to identify how strong words are associated.If the MI is greater than or equal to 3，the collocation is significant.

Steps are first searching provide，offer respectively in the sub-corpus，then comparing the different collocations of them in “collocation”，and choosing “any noun” to see which nouns collocate with them.The span is N-5 to N+5，and nouns with MI greater than 3 are chosen.

Nouns collocating with provide is classified into：

“encouraging” （stimulus，impetus，boost，incentives）；

“opinion” （insight，overview）；

“assistant” （assistance，guidance，support）；

“explaining” （clarification，briefing，illustration）；

“reference” （ benchmark，feedback，approximation）；

“comforting” （reassurance，guarantees，confirmation），

“apology” （excuse）；

“material” （cover，window，back-up，forum）

Nouns collocating with “offer” is classified into

“encouraging” （incentive，hope，advantage）；

“opinion” （insight，advice）；

“explaining” （explanation）；

“chance” （opportunity，chance，alternative）；

“assistant” （help，protection）；

“material” （facility，cover，course）；

Its evident that there are some nouns can collocate with provide and offer，like Insight，Service，Cove etc.Moreover，even words arent on the collocation lists of provide and offer at the same time，they share a similar meaning，like Assistance and Support collocate with provide，while Help collocates with offer，but they are used as the same meaning “to give someone some aid”.

2.2 SPs Compared

Stubbs （1996） divided SP into three categories：positive，negative and neutral SP，including analyzing the SP from colligation；from collocation；from both.The second approach is used in this paper.By checking in the concordances，those “encouraging”，“assistant”，“comforting” and “chance” words have more positive meanings，the word “excuse” is more negative，and others are more neutral.

The analysis shows that both provide and offer convey neutral and positive SP，in which neutral SP is expressed more often.The result of neutral prosody in commercial English is not surprising.SP is a language convention that people use to indicate their attitude.Thuse，if people want to show their attitude or intention，people will add affecting association to the neutrality of language to achieve a certain kind of intention or attitude.As this paper mainly focus on the SP of provide and offer in commercial English，which is selected from the national and local newspapers about commerce，finance and economics.Thus，these two words are more likely used to describe a commercial facts with a neutral meaning.Of course，the positive SP these two words conveyed can explain they are more inclined to give others some good “things” rather bad ones.

3 Conclusions

Based on the sub-corpus，it proves that provide is used more often in commerce than offer.Moreover，the statistics show many words can collocate with both provide and offer.Meanwhile，the collocations show that both provide and offer convey a more neutral and positive SP in commercial English.The result is quit understandable because words are selected more neutral to describe a commercial fact in business.