Frequency and Collocational Meanings of Near-synonymous Adjectives in Secondary School Level English Textbooks in Pakistan: A Corpus-based Study
Keywords:
Collocations Collocational Meaning Frequency Corpus Pakistani English TextbooksAbstract
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.
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Citation of this paper
Khalil, S., Muhammad, S., Hamid, N & Khatoon, S. (2022). Frequency and
collocational meanings of near-synonymous adjectives in secondary
school level English textbooks in Pakistan: A corpus-based study.
Erevna: Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 6(2), 30-42
