Abstract

This empirical study investigates the commonalities and contrasts in usage of the word items ‘typically’ and ‘usually’ by consulting the large-sized British National Corpus (BNC). The difference in usage of these adverbial words have been frequently problematic to my EFL students. Despite that they are recognised intuitively and in dictionaries as synonyms, linguists such as Quine (1951) argue that full synonymy between two or more words do not exist and others such as Partington (1998) identify such words are ‘quasi-synonyms’. Successful related investigations in corpus linguistics support the methodology of this study to suggest the usefulness of such analysis. The methodology tests revealed a thorough explanation by examining the two words’ collocation, phraseology, and semantic prosody. It used two corpus metrics, T-score and Mutual Information to surface the strongest and most significant collocates respectively which distinguished usage patterns. It also followed Sinclair’s (1998) 4-stage model to eventually surface positive and negative semantic prosodies which further identified their patterns. ‘Typically’ and ‘usually’ were also tested for colligation to surface grammatical patterns using the corpus POS-tags collocation search tool and then validated with the aid of Sinclair’s idiom principle (Hunston, 2002:144-147). The methodology demonstrated effectiveness in surfacing results which can be considered as solid evidence with the caveat that they are only based on the texts of the BNC.

Key words: BNC Corpus, collocation, phraseology, semantic prosody, T-score, MI, concordance lines, kw, rank, frequency, node.