A semantic prosody and grammatical patterns analysis of near-synonym pair quit and stop in the COCA

This corpus-based study aimed to investigate the semantic prosodies and grammatical patterns of a near-synonym pair quit and stop, which were chosen from the academia vocabulary list. Longman and Cambridge online dictionaries were used as reference for meanings and grammatical patterns. Data in terms of collocations and concordance lines are obtained from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Both quit and stop were found to have neutral semantic prosodies through collocational behavior and contextual analysis. Despite sharing core meanings, the grammatical patterns of quit and stop cannot be completely shared or used interchangeably in all contexts since passive structure, past participle, phrasal verbs, base form as a noun, adjective + noun, and conditional present do not exist for quit but only for stop.