Frequency and Collocational Meanings of Near-synonymous Adjectives in Secondary School Level English Textbooks in Pakistan

A Corpusbased Study

Abstract

This paper reports results of the research study that explored and analyzed frequency distribution of the three selected adjectives 'Great', 'Large' and 'Big' and their collocates as well as the collocational meanings of these adjectives in English textbooks of the four provinces that are used for teaching English at secondary school levels. The academic register of British National Corpus (BNC) and Oxford Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary (OALD) were used for comparison and as reference points. Corpus of Pakistani English Textbooks (COPET) was developed, consisting of eight English textbooks for grade IX and X. The study followed the framework of senses and meanings of Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998). Antconc 3.4.4 was used to extract frequencies of the selected nodes and their collocates for analysis. The data sets were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Analysis of the results shows that the selected nearsynonymous adjectives occur in higher frequency in COPET as compared to academic register of BNC. The two corpora do not correspond with regard to ranking and frequency of the top ten collocates of these adjectives. Both the corpora convey the same meanings of the selected words. However, academic register of BNC imparts additional meanings of 'Great' and 'Big' at some places. There is some correspondence between meanings conveyed by the selected adjectives in OALD, academic register of BNC, and COPET but OALD carries a greater variety and range of meanings of the selected words whereas COPET falls quite short in this capacity.