A corpus-based study of English synonyms: attack and assault

The study investigates two synonyms, namely attack and assault as verbs and nouns based on three criteria: senses of meaning, genres, and collocations. The data of the target synonyms derived from Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, Macmillan Dictionary, and Cambridge Dictionary in Online version, along with the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The result indicates that the target synonyms differ in three criteria. According to the senses of meanings, assault as verb implies to affect someone’s senses of perceptions while attack as verb and noun can be more general; attack as a verb and noun seems to have a high degree of informality in terms of their genres. Based on COCA frequency and the MI value, the majority of noun and adjective collocates of attack are associated with broader and more general themes whereas most of the noun and adjective collocates of assault are related to a specific and narrower sense. For this reason, these synonyms are considered as near synonyms. This corpus-based study is not only about lexical knowledge of synonyms, but it can also offer pedagogical implications. Since a corpus can contribute much more insightful lexical knowledge in the real-world context, this might encourage English teachers to promote corpora as an authentic source in addition to dictionaries.