A Corpus-Based Analysis of Synonyms

Church et al. (1991:12-13) have introduced some statistical measures such as Mutual Information (MI) test and t-score to identify significant lexical relations, especially to estimate associations between two words. On the other hand, Lyons (1995:62) has mentioned that the lack of absolute synonymy between the synonymous pair ‘big’ and ‘large’ is caused by the difference in their collocates. This paper intends to study the differences between synonymous pairs in terms of collocations using these two mentioned tests whilst mentioning the significance of linguistic corpora and the importance of statistical measures on linguistic studies.