Abstract: A couple of verbs in English can express the concept of LAUGH , and this makes it difficult for English learners to distinguish them. With the help of British National Corpus, this paper retrieves verbs of laugh through the Sketch Engine tool. Taking smile, laugh, grin, chortle, chuckle, giggle, smirk, sneer as examples, this paper attempts to study these semantic differences of these verbs. Results show that they possess their own distinctive characteristics in terms of their collocations, colligations and semantic prosodies.

     Key Words: Sketch Engine; BNC; laugh; near-synonyms

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Near-synonyms: Classification and Usage Analysis-3

2.1 Classification-3

2.2 Usage Analysis-4

2.2.1 Origin and Stylistic Coloring-4

2.2.2 Emotional coloring-4

2.2.3 Grammatical characteristic-4

2.2.4 Collocation-5

2.2.5 American English and British English-5

4. A Corpus-based Study of the Semantic Differences Between the Near-Synonyms of LAUGH-6

4.1 Introduction to BNC & Sketch Engine-6

4.2 Results and Discussion-7

4.2.1 Differences in Frequency-7

4.2.2 Differences in Register Distribution: Spoken, Fiction, Newspaper, Magazine and Academic-8

4.2.3 Differences in Colligation-10

4.2.4 Differences in Collocation-21

5. Conclusion-27

References-29