A corpus-based study of English synonyms: achieve, acomplish, and attain

This study was aimed at investigating three synonymous verbs focusing on the past-tense and past-participle forms, i.e. achieved, accomplished, and attained, in terms of the sense of meaning and collocation in order to examine the similarities and differences with regard to using the most proper word in various contexts. The data was collected from two dictionaries first, namely, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2015) and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2014).

This was compared with the first randomly-searched three hundred concordance lines of each verb derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to obtain more information not specified in the dictionaries. In addition, each synonym was distinguished by tenses and voices in order to determine the particular forms that they frequently tended to occur in. The results showed that the three verbs are near synonyms since they shared some common meanings and collocations; however, there were also some different meanings and collocations.