Constraints on the collocational behaviors of Chinese near-synonyms

Abstract This paper reports a corpus-based study to examine how Chinese near-synonyms choose their typical collocates. Near-synonyms commonly misused by English-speaking learners of Chinese were selected for analysis. Results obtained from the corpora (the Chinese Internet Corpus by the University of Leeds and the Lancaster corpus of Mandarin Chinese) indicate that the collocational behaviors of the selected synonyms are constrained by their own semantic, grammatical, prosodic, stylistic and pragmatic features and hence are explainable to second/foreign learners. Findings of this study will contribute to the design of collocation/synonym dictionary as well as the instruction of collocations as a second/foreign language.