The Problem of Semantic Overlap and Distinction in English Verbs: A Corpus-Based Study of English Synonyms “AMUSE,” “ENTERTAIN,” and “DIVERT”
คำสำคัญ:
Synonyms, Corpus linguistics, Corpus-based study, Collocation, COCAบทคัดย่อ
Distinguishing between the near-synonyms amuse, entertain, and divert remains a challenge for EFL learners due to nuanced semantic and distributional overlaps. Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study analyzed the lemmas of these verbs within a [4L, 4R] collocation window (MI ≥ 3.0) to identify the top 30 noun collocates across eight genres. Frequency data reveal that entertains is the most versatile, occurring broadly in news and web genres, whereas amuse is restricted primarily to narrative contexts in fiction and spoken texts. In contrast, divert predominates in formal and academic domains, specifically relating to the redirection of attention or resources. Collocational patterns suggest that amuse strongly associates with human emotional reactions, entertain with social roles and abstract ideas, and divert with technical or administrative concepts. These corpus-derived patterns provide essential linguistic evidence for enhancing lexical precision in vocabulary instruction, though further empirical study is required to evaluate their direct impact on learning outcomes.
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