English synonym discrimination has always been a heavy difficulty in vocabulary teaching and learning at most Chinese middle schools.With the rise of corpus linguistics,a corpus-oriented study can be used for the learning of synonyms because corpus contains a majority of natural,authentic language materials.This article attempts to analyze the different distribution of a pair of English synonyms"situation"and"condition"from different registers based on British National Corpus(BNC).And then the further comparison between two synonyms is made from the perspective of colligation,semantic prosody.Finally,it concludes that corpus is of great help to English vocabulary teaching,therefore teachers are supposed to introduce corpus retrieval appropriately to help students acquire the word knowledge.
