A corpus-based investigation of synonymy of verbs in Arabic language and the role of collocation in assigning meaning

Linguistic perspectives have provided new tools for the study of language. One of these approaches is corpus linguistics which studies language with utilizes enormous amount of linguistic data. Scrutinizing the collocation of words in a large body of natural language data provides a broader horizon for examining synonymy. In the present study, five categories of synonymous words have been selected, including: (کتم, ستر), (اعطی, منح), (ترک, غادر), (طرد, نبذ, دحر) and (شرب, ارتشف). The research approach was synchronic and synonymous words were searched in arTenTen2012 corpus using Sketch engine tool. Then, collocations with higher frequencies were extracted. Since all verbs were chosen from among several types with a focus on left-hand collocations which are considered as object verbs or quasi-verbs. Common and distinct levels of each synonym are presented in the form of statistical tables. Results of the study demonstrated that “طرد”, “نبذ” and “دحر” collocate with persons, reprehensible attributes and suppression of seditions and diseases, respectively. Verbs which mean “ترک” and “غادر” only have meaning in common with places. However, “غادر” has the highest frequency with places where the person doesn’t normally return to them. In contrast, “ترک” has been used exclusively for religious duties and signs. It is noteworthy that “غادر” is not used in these contexts. The verb “اعطی” deals with cases in which bestowal does not occur physically. But objects which collocate with “منح” are of physical type or items that are provided as evidence and permission.