A corpus-based study of English synonyms: unexpected, unforeseen, and unanticipated

This study aims to distinguish three English synonyms, i.e., unexpected, unforeseen, and unanticipated, in terms of their meanings, noun collocates, and degrees of formality. Definitions and sample sentences were collected from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. In addition, frequencies of synonyms, noun collocates, and their distributions in eight discourse genres were investigated through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Although the three synonyms share the same core meaning, it was found that they cannot be used interchangeably in every situation. Firstly, the analysis of collocation revealed that they can co-occur with nouns referring to an event or an outcome. In particular, however, unexpected often co-occurs with nouns referring to a person and an emotion, while unforeseen and unanticipated do not. Secondly, the analysis of degrees of formality suggested unanticipated has the highest degree of formality because the word is most frequent in a formal context, followed by unforeseen and unexpected respectively