A Corpus-Based Study on English Synonyms Convention and Tradition

For English learners, the discrimination of synonyms is a big problem, but corpus is an effective tool to clear the difference between them. It offers English learners an authentic, simple and straightforward way to overcome the difficulties within synonyms. In this paper, the researcher uses a corpus-based method to study the difference between two English words - tradition and convention, by using the qualitative and quantitative analysis to analyze the collocation and semantic prosody of these two words. According to the analysis of the researcher, tradition is more frequently used in subjects related to religion and culture and more widely used in written English, especially in literary or academic works while convention is more frequently used in subjects related to politics and social life and more widely used in spoken English, but they all hold neutral semantic prosody. A corpus-based study is helpful to English teaching and learning.