A corpus-based study of English synonyms: possible, probable, and likely

Two online dictionaries (the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) were used in comparison to the corpus-based data (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) via five hundred concordance lines for exploring the similarities and differences between the synonyms.

The study discovered that these three adjective synonyms cannot be substituted in all contexts although they share the same core meaning. They have some differences in meaning, grammatical pattern, noun collocation and stylistic information. Furthermore, the corpora provide additional linguistic information not existent in the dictionaries, e.g. grammatical pattern, collocation, and stylistic information, etc.