A corpus-based study of near-synonyms lawyer, attorney, solicitor, barrister and advocate

Abstract

Nowadays, English is the most used language among people with different native tongues. Knowing the History of English, it is unsurprising to find millions of words in this language. Texts should be coherent and engaging while communicating with spoken or written language; this is not easy for anyone. This task becomes even more complicated if the language we are going to use is not our native, for example, English language for Lithuanians. To help achieve this challenging task, lexical elements like synonyms can be used. Synonyms help by making the text more coherent and engaging. The problem arises since there are many synonyms in English, and it is challenging to decide what word substitute by which. Information found in dictionaries is not always informative, and only relying on a dictionary can make some errors in using substitute words. Corpus is a collection of spoken or written texts stored on the internet, which can be used to search for information on any word. This research was written because of taking an interest in how much corpus can assist people in learning synonyms. Especially interest was taken in the nouns lawyer, , solicitor, barrister, and advocate. British National Corpus (BNC) was used with Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). These corpora were chosen because of their size and regional distinctions mentioned in the dictionary about these synonyms. This research aim was to do a corpus-based analysis of lawyer, attorney, solicitor, barrister, and advocate. To accomplish this aim, these research questions were used: to find out the differences in frequency and distribution across different genres between lawyer, attorney, solicitor, barrister, and advocate in BNC and COCA. The following research question aimed to analyze collocations and their patterns between lawyer, attorney, solicitor, barrister, and advocate in COCA and BNC. Distribution among different genres can help identify if a word is formal or informal. The next research question was to compare how much information differs from the dictionary to information analyzed from the corpus. Theoretical literature was reviewed that contained information about this research. The theory part reviewed synonym types, corpus definition, COCA, BNC, and corpus linguistics. Also, corpus tools found in only corpora were analyzed too. Previous research on synonyms was the last part of the theory part. After analyzing BNC and COCA corpora, the information was found about lawyer, attorney, solicitor, barrister, and advocate frequency and distribution among different genres. With that information degree of formality of the target nouns were deduced. The most frequent noun in BNC was solicitor; the following were lawyer, advocate, attorney, and barrister. The most frequent noun in COCA was attorney, followed by lawyer, advocate, solicitor, and barrister. In BNC, corpus lawyer was used more frequently in informal contexts such as spoken language and fiction, although he was found in formal contexts too. On the other hand, attorney was more frequent in the formal genre, such as newspaper and academic texts. Distribution seems similar between COCA and BNC of this noun. The noun solicitor was distributed evenly between different genres in BNC, but this noun was more frequent in the COCA corpus in a formal context. The noun barrister was more frequent in the formal context in BNC. Contrarily, in the COCA corpus, the noun appeared more frequently in informal contexts (tv/media). After analyzing collocations, many similarities were found, such as the same collocational patterns between the noun lawyer, attorney, solicitor, barrister, and advocate. After comparing Longman Dictionary Online with corpus analysis, the conclusion was made that corpus contains much more information. Employing corpora to find more information about language, in this case, lexical element synonyms, is advised.