A corpus-based study of English synonyms: arrive and reach

The purpose of the study was to investigate the similarities and differences of the two English synonymous verbs arrive and reach, in three aspects: genre distribution, noun collocation in relation to semantic preference, and grammatical patterns. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English were used as the primary source of information for the target synonyms, while the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) served as the main corpus database for data collection. The first one hundred concordance lines from each verb were analyzed manually for the grammatical patterns. The results revealed that the target synonymous verbs share the same core meaning as they were used to get to the place or the point. Even though they have the same fundamental meaning, these verbs cannot be substituted in all contexts, according to the study's findings. They differ with some types of genres and collocations. In addition, the difference in grammatical patterns of the near-synonyms indicate that the two synonymous verbs are near synonyms not perfect or strict synonyms.