A corpus-based study of English synonyms of the adjectives far, distant, and remote

This corpus-based study investigates the similarities and differences of the three synonymous adjectives ‘far’, ‘distant’, and ‘remote’, with the emphasis on formal degree as well as their collocations with the combination of semantic preference. The data was derived from COCA, or Corpus of Contemporary American English. The results revealed that ‘remote’ is more formal than ‘distant’ and ‘far’, as evidenced by comparing their frequency of use across eight genres. Regarding collocations and semantic preference, it appears that not all synonyms appear with the same words, and they also have some different semantic categories. Only ‘distant’ is used to describe a noun pertaining to time, kinship, sound, and a unit of distance. In the contexts of electronic equipment and computer symptoms or servers, however, only ‘remote’ is applied. More interestingly, ‘far’ rarely occurs with an adverb, while ‘distant’ has a large number of adverb collocates. As a result, despite having the same core meaning, they cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts.