A corpus-based study of near synonyms: ruin, destroy, and damage

This study examines three synonymous verbs destroy, ruin, and damage, focusing on the similarities and the differences in their meaning, degree of formality across genres, and noun collocation in relation to semantic preference. The research instruments used in this study were the online version of the Longman Dictionary ofContemporary English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).The results indicate that these synonyms have the same core meaning; however, their definitions differ slightly. In terms of formality, these synonyms have the same degrees of formality and are frequently employed in informal contexts. Regarding nouncollocates, the top thirty noun collocates of the target synonymous verbs with the highest frequency and a significant MI score level of 3 were classified according to their semantic preference. It was discovered that these synonyms share someoverlapping noun collocations and themes. Nonetheless, these synonyms also occur in specific nouns. The difference in collocational patterns among the near-synonyms suggests that the three synonymous verbs cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts.