What Can Near Synonyms Tell Us?

This study examines a near synonym pair fangbian and bianli, ‘to be convenient,’ and extracts the contrasts that dictate their semantic and associated syntactic behaviors. Corpus data reveal important but opaque distributional differences between these synonyms that are not readily apparent based on native speaker intuition. In particular, we argue that this synonym pair can be accounted for with a lexical conceptual profile. This study demonstrates how corpus data can serve as a useful tool for probing the interaction between syntax and semantics.