英語近義詞Accommodate和Adapt以及Accommodate和Contain的語意分析

Abstract

本研究旨在分析英語近義詞accommodate和adapt的語意異同以及accommodate和contain的語意異同，分析內容包括它們的語意、句型模式、所搭配的名詞詞組所呈現的語意特徵，以及語意韻。此研究的600筆語料來自於美國當代英語語料庫(Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA)，accommodate、adapt及contain各200筆。研究結果發現，第一組近義詞accommodate和adapt不只是在句型使用模式上有高度雷同，在「名詞搭配詞」的語意特徵也都是以「有生命」占最大多數的名詞搭配詞的特徵。再者，accommodate和adapt多在句中表達「配合」或「適應」之意，則在語意韻上大部分句子含有「正面的」語意內涵。第二組近義詞accommodate和contain由於動詞語意相同的部分有超過一半以上都是「容納」或「包括」之意且兩動詞在句型模式上是完全一致。而動詞accommodate和contain所搭配的主詞及受詞在語意特徵上，也都以能夠有容納能力的「空間」特徵、或是有乘載能力「無生命」特徵的容器、物品等等為主。因此，這對近義詞在語意韻上是以中性內涵為絕大部分，而較少部分是負面意涵。

This study aims to conduct a semantic analysis of two pairs of English near-synonyms—accommodate vs. adapt and accommodate vs. contain. The analysis includes examining the meanings, sentence patterns, semantic features of the noun phrases that co-occur with these two English near-synonym pairs, and the semantic prosody of these two pairs. The data used for this study consists of 600 tokens retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), 200 tokens for each of the three verbs.The research findings indicate that the first verb pair, accommodate and adapt, shares synonymous meanings, and not only do they exhibit a high degree of similarity in sentence patterns, but the predominant semantic feature among their collocational noun phrases—subject and objects is also animate. Moreover, as accommodate and adapt often express the sense of"cooperating" or "adjusting”, in terms of semantic prosody, most cases exhibit a positive connotation. In the case of the second pair of synonymous verbs, accommodate and contain, over half of their shared lexical meanings involve the concept of "accommodating" or "including”, and the two verbs have identical sentence patterns, namely S + Vt + O. Regarding the semantic features of the subjects and objects associated with the verbs accommodate and contain, they primarily involve entities with thecapacity to accommodate or contain, such as space or inanimate objects capable of carrying or holding. Thus, these two synonymous words exhibit a predominantly neutral connotation in their semantic prosody, with a smaller portion expressing negative connotations.