A corpus-based study of English synonyms clear, obvious, apparent, and evident: implications for ELT

This study aims to examine four English synonyms: clear, obvious, apparent, and evident; focusing on meanings, degree of formality, collocations, semantic preference and prosody, and grammatical patterns. The data used to distinguish the four selected synonyms were drawn from Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2014), Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English online, Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2009), Macmillan Dictionary online, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It was found that the four synonyms share the same core meaning while their differences lie in detailed meanings, degree of formality, collocations, semantic preference and prosody, and grammatical patterns; all of these confirm their status as synonyms which are not interchangeable in all contexts of use. The results show that the corpus provides much more information that does not exist in the dictionaries. Moreover, this study also shed light on pedagogical implication as teachers and learners can learn about loose synonyms and how to distinguish them using a corpus-based methodology from this study.