Synonym differentiation has always been a difficulty in English learning. Traditionally, definitions and examples from dic-tionaries are taken to illustrate shades of differences between synonyms, which fails to provide a comprehensive description of these differences for students to differ synonyms. However, with the large volume, authentic materials, fast and convenient retrieval pro-vided by corpus, the corpus-based synonym differentiation method can make a comprehensive description of synonyms in terms of their distinctive features in frequency distribution, collocation, colligation and semantic prosody. A corpus-based method will be employed to analyze the differences among the three English synonyms"conquer""overcome"and"surmount"based on the data collected from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), so as to throw new light on synonym differentiation, offering a new way to study synonyms, and to provide references for lexical teaching and second language acquisition.
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