Primary, Main, and Major: Learning the Synonyms through Corpus Data

English is widely known as a language containing number of near-synonyms, i.e. words with similar meaning, and therefore learners are often confronted difficulty in the use near-synonyms different contexts. This corpus-informed study aims to differentiate synonyms primary, main , major focusing on their distribution across genres collocation usage. The three target were selected majo r among first 1,000 spoken written (Longman Dictionary Contemporary English, 2014), while primary appears Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL). data from Corpus American (COCA) demonstrated that synonymous adjectives most frequently occur academic texts, being more common newspapers magazines. Through analysis based frequency MI score, concern strongly collocates all adjectives, some noun combined only certain pairs synonyms, e.g. primary/main focus main/major theme primary/major factor . More interestingly, attached specific semantic themes, exclusively associated health election, place, food, or literature, sports business. As implications for ELT, teachers encouraged develop synonym lessons typical derived authentic corpus-based COCA.