Achieve, attain and accomplish from a corpus based perspective

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES LÊ THỊ THU HỒNG “ACHIEVE”, “ATTAIN” AND “ACCOMPLISH” FROM A CORPUS-BASED PERSPECTIVE “Achieve”, “attain” “accomplish” góc nhìn phương pháp khối liệu M.A MINOR PROGRAM THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60220201 HANOI, 2017 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES LÊ THỊ THU HỒNG “ACHIEVE”, “ATTAIN” AND “ACCOMPLISH” FROM A CORPUS-BASED PERSPECTIVE “Achieve”, “attain” “accomplish” góc nhìn phương pháp khối liệu M.A MINOR PROGRAM THESIS Field : English Linguistics Code : 60220201 Supervisor : Dr Trần Thị Thu Hiền HANOI, 2017 DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby declare that the thesis entitled ―ACHIEVE, ATTAIN AND ACCOMPLISH FROM A CORPUS-BASED PERSPECTIVE‖ is the result of my own study It was conducted with scientific guidance of Dr Trần Thị Thu Hiền The data and conclusions of the study presented in the thesis have never been published in any form i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude towards my supervisor, Dr Trần Thị Thu Hiền, for her immense support and invaluable guidance without which my study would be far from finished Also, I am grateful to all the lecturers and staffers at the Faculty of Post-graduate Studies, University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University of Hanoi Their support and consideration have enabled me to pursue the course Last but not least, my sincere thanks go to my beloved family for their love, encouragement and support while I was conducting this research ii ABSTRACT This descriptive research exploits corpus linguistic methods in order to differentiate the three synonymous verbs achieve, attain and accomplish by realizing their similarities and differences in meanings and usages The data collection instruments include two large corpora, namely the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Collins Wordbank Online, and six dictionaries Statistical analysis in combination with intuitive-based interpretation of the data reveals significant findings: (1) the three verbs have both overlapping as well as exclusive senses, whose frequencies are different across words; (2) regarding register, all the verbs are most preferred in academic journals even though accomplish has lower formality level than the other two; and (3) in terms of collocational properties, despite a few mutual collocates, each verb tends to favorably co-occur with a distinctive group of nouns as object Keyword: near-synonym, corpus linguistics, word sense, collocation iii TABLE OF CONTENS DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii LIST OF TABLES vi LIST OF FIGURES vii CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale 1.2 Aim and objectives of the study 1.3 Research questions 1.4 Research methods 1.5 Scope of the study 1.6 Significance of the research 1.7 Organization of the study CHAPTER LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Synonymy 2.1.1 Synonymy as absolute synonymy 2.1.2 Synonymy as near-synonymy 2.1.3 Near-synonymic differences 2.2 Corpus linguistics 14 2.2.1 Corpus 14 2.2.2 Corpus linguistics 15 2.2.3 Corpus linguistics in synonymy study 15 2.3 Previous studies 16 CHAPTER METHODOLOGY 18 3.1 Research approaches 18 3.2 Data sources 18 3.3 Data collection procedure 20 iv 3.3.1 Phase - Word senses and frequencies of senses 20 3.3.2 Phase - Register 21 3.3.3 Phase - Collocational properties 21 CHAPTER FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 23 4.1 Word senses and frequencies of senses 23 4.1.1 Word senses 23 4.1.2 Frequencies of senses 27 4.2 Register 29 4.3 Collocational properties 32 4.3.1 Preferred collocation 32 4.3.2 Less preferred and anti-collocation 39 CHAPTER CONCLUSION 44 5.1 Concluding remarks 44 5.2 Implications 45 5.3 Limitations of the study and recommendations for further research .47 REFERENCES 48 APPENDIX I v LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 Dimensions of denotation variations 11 Table 4.1 Dictionary senses of achieve, attain and accomplish .27 Table 4.2 Sense distribution of achieve, attain and accomplish 27 Table 4.3 Frequencies of achieve, attain and accomplish in different genres .30 Table 4.4 Top mutual collocates of achieve, attain and accomplish .33 Table 4.5 Top object collocates of achieve only, 36 attain only and accomplish only 36 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Classification of synonymic difference by Edmonds (1999) and Edmonds and Hirst (2002) 10 Figure 2.2 Gove‘s (1973) entry (abridged) for the near-synonyms of lie .11 Figure 3.1 Corpus command for frequencies on the COCA (screenshot) .21 Figure 3.2 Command for collocation in the CWO (screenshot) 22 Figure 4.1 The proportion of tokens in different genres for achieve, attain and accomplish 31 Figure 4.2 Sketch difference of objects between achieve and attain 40 Figure 4.4 Sketch difference of objects between attain and accomplish 42 Figure 4.5 Summary of preferred, less preferred and anti-collocates of achieve, attain and accomplish 43 vii CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale More than being a linguistic instrument, English, the world language, leads its learners to broadened horizons and brings them to various perspectives Hence, the teaching of English as a second or foreign language has never ceased to be vital Indeed, it is hardly of any surprises that English as a school subject accounts for the most teaching hours in classrooms all over the world compared to any other subject Vietnam, in the process of renovating its education and particularly its English language teaching, has placed emphasis on the development of teachers‘ and learners‘ proficiency of the language As a Vietnamese learner and teacher of English, the author has recognized difficulties met by non-native speakers in terms of understanding and using correct vocabulary in different contexts This challenge becomes even more significant when it comes to word choice among confusing synonyms Among various confusing groups of synonyms, achieve, attain and accomplish appear one of the most challenging to English learners as well as the author Are they completely the same in meaning? If not, how are they different? In which aspects they resemble and/or differ? Motivated by the desire to better understand this issue, the author intends to investigate the meaning and usages of these often-misused synonyms, achieve, attain and accomplish Since the arrival of information technologies and the development of computer, corpora have been revolutionized into enormous electronic collections of authentic texts which provide invaluable insights into the distribution of words in a language This would assist language researchers as well as language users, especially those who are non-native, to differentiate between near-synonyms based on their patterns of distribution retrieved automatically from corpora This encourages the author to exploit this immensely promising tool to examine the nearsynonyms mentioned word to go with a certain word or not All in all, this piece of research has illustrated a practical measure for English users, teachers and learners to distinguish between near-synonyms, providing statistical data which proves to be helpful in facilitating language users to identify the nuances in meaning and usages of near-synonyms The results of the research have great pedagogical implications 5.3 Limitations of the study and recommendations for further research Being one of the author‘s first attempt at studying synonymy, the research undoubtedly has a number of limitations First of all, due to the limited scope of the study, it was only feasible to analyze three near-synonyms despite the vast number of near-synonyms that need to be investigated Therefore, the author plans to focus on a larger number of nearsynonyms in her future research Secondly, this study only consulted two among many available corpora, which failed to cover the various variants of the English language, i.e., the findings of the study may only apply to one variant of English but not another This suggest the author to find access to other corpora in order to carry out more comprehensive research in the future Finally, it was a shortcoming of the research to only be able to investigate three synonym nuances, i.e., senses and frequencies of sense, register and collocational behaviors These aspects have provided a certain insight into the meaning and usage of the three verbs; however, the comparison of achieve, attain and accomplish could have possibly been more thorough and in-depth had the corpora allowed for more insights into other synonym differences This urges the author to study further into the topic for framework and approaches to better understand synonymy 47 REFERENCES Ajmer, K & Altenberg, B (1991) English Corpus Linguistics London: Longman American heritage dictionary of the English language https://ahdictionary.com/ (last accessed 20 June 2017) Andrews, L (2006) Language Exploration and Awareness: A Resource Book for Teachers NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers Biber, D., Susan, C., & Randi, R (1998) Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bolinger, D L (1968) Entailment and the meaning of structures Glossa 2, 119-127 Bowker, L., & Pearson, J (2002) Working with Specialized Language: A Practical Guide to Using Corpora London: Routledge Chapman, R L (1992) Roget‘s International Thesaurus HarperCollins Publishers, th edition Chung, S F., & Ahrens, K (2008) MARVS revisited: Incorporating sense distribution and mutual information into near-synonym analyses Language and Linguistics: Lexicon, Grammar and Natural Language Processing, 9(2), 415-434 Chung, S F (2011) A corpus based analysis of ―create‖ and ―produce‖ Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 4(2), 399-425 Church, K W., Gale, W., Hanks, P., Hindle, D & Moon, R (1994) Lexical substitutability Computational Approaches to the Lexicon, 153-177 Oxford: Oxford University Press Clark, E V (1992) Conventionality and contrast: Pragmatic principles with lexical consequences In Lehrer and Kittay, 1992, 171-188 Cobuild Advanced English dictionary https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english (last accessed 20 June 2017) Cruse, A D (1986) Lexical Semantics Cambridge University Press 48 Crystal, D (1985) Linguistics London: Penguin Books Dao, H T (2011) Corpus technology in teaching and learning Vietnamese as a foreign language Proceedings of the First International Conference of Research and Teaching Vietnamese Language, Vung Tau, 50-57 Davies, M (2009) The 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990-2008+) – Design, architecture, and linguistic insights International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(2), 159-190 Davies, M (2010) The Corpus of Contemporary American English as the first reliable monitor corpus of English Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25(4), 447-464 DiMacro, C., Hirst, G., & Stede, M (1993) The semantic and stylistic differentiation of synonyms and near-synonyms AAAI Spring Symposium on Building Lexicons for Machine Translation, 114-121 Edmonds, P (1999) Semantic representations of near-synonyms for automatic lexical choice Retrieved from the National Library of Canada Edmonds, P., & Hirst, G (2002) Near-synonymy and lexical choice Computational Linguistics, 28(2), 105-144 Egan, R F (1973) Survey of the history of English synonym Webster‘s New Dictionary of Synonyms, 5a-31a Firth, J R (1957) Papers in linguistics Oxford: Oxford University Press Goodman, N (1952) On likeness of meaning In Linsky, L., editor, Semantics and the Philosophy of Language Illinois, Ill: University of Illinois Press Gove, P.B (1973) Webster‘s New Dictionary of Synonyms G & C Merriam Co Gries, S Th., & Otani, N (n.d.) 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reach Achieve fame as a singer; achieve a record speed Intransitive To succeed in accomplishing; bring about Achieve a task; achieve an improvement in foreign relations To accomplish something successfully; perform at a standard or above standard level Skills needed to achieve at school (MWD) Transitive To carry out successfully: accomplish Achieve a gradual increase in production Transitive To get or attain as the result of exertion: reach Achieved a high degree of skill; achieved greatness Intransitive To attain a desired end or aim: become successful (OALD) Transitive To succeed in reaching a particular goal, status or standard, especially by making an effort for a long time He had finally achieved success They could not achieve their target of less than 3% inflation Synonym: Attain I Transitive To succeed in doing sth or causing sth to happen I haven‘t achieved very much today All you‘ve achieved is to upset my parents Synonym: Accomplish Intransitive To be successful Their background gives them little chance of achieving at school (LDOCE) Transitive To successfully complete something or get a good result, especially by working hard She eventually achieved her goal of becoming a professor Wilson has achieved considerable success as an artist Frances achieved very good exam results Register : In everyday English, people usually say someone gets a result rather than achieves it He got good grades in his final exams Intransitive To be successful in a particular kind of job or activity We want all our students to achieve within their chosen profession (CAED) If you achieve a particular aim or effect, you succeed in doing it or causing it to happen, usually after a lot of effort There are many who will work hard to achieve these goals [VERB noun] We have achieved what we set out to [VERB noun] Synonym : accomplish, reach, fulfil, finish II APPENDIX 1B – Dictionary entries of attain (AHD) Transitive To gain as an objective; achieve attain a diploma by hard work Intransitive To come to or arrive at, as through movement, growth, or the passage of time Redwoods can attain a height of 300 feet To succeed in a directed effort, process, or progression attained to high office; eventually attained to wisdom (MWD) Transitive To reach as an end : gain, achieve attain a goal Transitive To come into possession of : obtain He attained preferment over his fellows Transitive To come to as the end of a progression or course of movement They attained the top of the hill attain a ripe old age Intransitive To come or arrive by motion, growth, or effort —usually used with to will probably attain to a height of six feet (OALD) Formal To succeed in getting sth, usually after a lot of effort Most of our students attained five ‗A‘ grades in their exams III Formal To reach a particular age, level or condition The cheetah can attain speed of up to 97 kph (LDOCE) verb [transitive] formal Transitive, formal To succeed in achieving something after trying for a long time More women are attaining positions of power Transitive, formal To reach a particular level, age, size etc Share prices attained a high of $3.27 After a year she had attained her ideal weight (CAED) Formal If you attain something, you gain it or achieve it, often after a lot of effort Jim is halfway to attaining his pilot's licence [VERB noun] Synonyms: obtain, get, win, reach If you attain a particular state or condition, you may reach it as a result of natural development or work hard to attain this state .attaining a state of calmness and confidence [VERB noun] Synonyms: reach, achieve, realize, acquire IV APPENDIX 1C – Dictionary entries of accomplish (AHD) To succeed in doing (a task, for example); carry out or complete (MWD) Transitive To bring about (a result) by effort have much to accomplish today Transitive To bring to completion : fulfill accomplish a job Transitive to succeed in reaching (a stage in a progression) would starve before accomplishing half the distance — W H Hudson †1922 Archaic To equip thoroughly perfect (OALD) To succeed in doing or completing something The first part of the plan has been safely accomplished I don‘t feel I‘ve accomplished very much today That‘s it Mission accomplished (=we have done what we aimed to do) Synonym : Achieve (LDOCE) Transitive To succeed in doing something, especially after trying very hard We have accomplished all we set out to Mission accomplished (= we have done V what we intended to do) Synonym : Achieve (CAED) If you accomplish something, you succeed in doing it If we'd all work together, I think we could accomplish our goal [VERB noun] They are skeptical about how much will be accomplished by legislation [be VERB-ed] Synonyms: realize, produce, effect, finish VI APPENDIX – Meriam Webster’s New Synonym Dictionary entry of achieve, attain and accomplish Achieve accomplish, effect, *perform, fulfill, execute, discharge Ana complete, finish, conclude : surmount, overcome, *conquer Ant fail (to something), fail (in) – Con *begin, commence, start attain, *reach, gain, compass Ana win, secure, obtain, acquire, *get: *realize, actualize: *come, arrive Ant miss (getting or attaining) – Con deviate, depart, *swerve: *escape, avoid, elude, shun Attain *reach, compass, gain, achieve Ana *come, arrive: win, acquire, secure, obtain, *get: accomplish, effect Accomplish achieve, effect, fulfill, discharge, execute, *perform Ana complete, finish, conclude : consumate : implement, *enforce Ant undo – Con thwart, *frustrate, foil, circumvent: defeat, beat, lick : *nullify, annul, negate VII APPENDIX 3A – Sample concordances of achieve VIII APPENDIX 3B – Sample concordances of attain IX APPENDIX 3C – Sample concordances of accomplish X ... collocates of attain but anticollocates of achieve Therefore, it will sound unnatural to say *attain a feat *attain a reduction *attain fame *attain a breakthrough *attain growth *achieve Buddhahood... *accomplish success *accomplish an effect *accomplish peace *accomplish equality *accomplish a status *accomplish a degree *accomplish a balance *accomplish an outcome *accomplish a level *accomplish. .. immense advantages in language study such as easy manipulation of data at minimal cost, accurate data processing and limitation of human bias Crystal (1985) adds that this collection of data can be