Near-Synonymous Phrases in the Extended Unit of Meaning Framework: A Case Study on “insist on” and “stick to” and Its Pedagogical Implications

Hua Tang

doi:10.63313/IJSSEH.9010

Authors

Hua Tang School of Foreign Languages, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing 401100, China Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.63313/IJSSEH.9010

Keywords:

Extended Unit of Meaning, Corpus, Near-synonyms, Collocation, Semantic Prosody

Abstract

Based on the theoretical framework of the extended unit of meaning, this paper mainly compares the similarities and differences between the two sets of near-synonymous verb phrases “insist on” and “stick to” in terms of register frequency distribution, semantic collocation, and semantic prosody characteris-tics in the native English corpus COCA and the Chinese learners’ writing corpus iWriteBaby, and analyzes the factors affecting learners’ acquisition. The study shows that native speakers distinguish between “insist on” and “stick to” in use, but Chinese learners confuse them due to the influence of mother tongue trans-fer and learning environment, resulting in significant differences in semantic characteristics compared with native English. The results of this study have cer-tain implications for second language vocabulary teaching.

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