Quick or Fast: A Corpus Based Study of English Synonyms

Abstract

This paper illustrates how the use of corpora can contribute to the study of English synonyms or near synonyms. Two English adjectives “quick” and “fast” were used in this study and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) from corpus.byu.edu was used as the source for exploring the similarities and differences between the two synonyms in question. Only the top 100 collocates of quick and fast with MI scores of at least 3 were extracted and ranked by frequency and the search was limited to nouns immediately following quick or fast. The result shows that some nouns are found to collocate with only either quick or fast, while a few can occur with both adjectives but usually focus on different aspects of meanings, i.e, quick tends to indicate merely the quality or property of an action while fast incorporates the sense of the manner of an action when used to modify the same noun.