Are Synonyms Always Synonymous? A Corpus- assisted Approach to Announce, Declare, and State

The study on (near) synonymous word has been of intriguing topic in the recent decades. Scholars have investigated them from diverse perspectives including but not limited to semantics, grammar, and language teaching. However, few of them examine synonymous verbs. This study endeavors to scrutinize ‘announce’, ‘declare’, and ‘state’ by employing descriptive qualitative approach and British National Corpus as data source. Besides, it also attempts to shed pivotal light the pedagogical implication of corpus linguistics to the teaching of word or vocabulary and meaning in use. Sketch Engine is used as instrument analysis by which collocation and concordance analysis were employed to elucidate word combination and contexts to produce meaning. The findings demonstrate that ‘announce’, ‘declare’, and ‘state’ could not be used rudimentary interchangeably since they carry out (slightly) different meaning depending on collocate word and grammatical pattern. This study also corroborated the notion that corpus linguistics plays significant role in foreign language teaching since it offers authentic materials and contextual clue for language use.


Introduction
Mastering foreign language, especially for students, nowadays is an important asset since they have to understand the use of lexical choice in formulating sentences in, for instance, English. Such lexical choice covers selecting synonymous words that are an essential feature to help students use English in either speaking or writing appropriately. However, it is evidence that there are no, if not impossible, absolute synonyms (Edmonds & Hirst, 2002) because they are not entirely interchangeable (Liu & Espino, 2002). Lyon (1968) even emphasized that words which convey exactly the same meaning are extremely rare if they do exist. Instead of synonyms, there are only near-synonyms which refer to words with similar meanings. Using near-synonyms with invariable precision could be a difficult task even for the native speakers (Edmonds & Hirst, 2002) and it becomes more frustrating for EFL students since they don"t have the innate capability to choose the utmost correct words. Teachers of EFL or ESL students therefore often teach students about word meanings mostly using dictionary if not depending solely on their vocabulary mastery.
Vocabulary plays a significant role for learners in acquiring a language (Cameron, 2001). It means that for someone to master a new language, they must firstly focus on expanding the ability to store vocabularies as many as possible. Vocabulary drilling, thus, has been mundane activities for EFL students and dictionary has been an inseparable part of it. Teachers would force students to look up word"s meaning in dictionary. Dictionary might or might not help the students as its purpose is to provide the meaning without usage example. It is become even more complicated when the time to learn about synonyms arrives as a need for enriching their vocabulary skills but they have not understood how "synonyms" are not interchangeable. Another phenomenon in vocabulary teaching is the provision of academic wordlist formulated by the help of corpus. However, relying on the academic wordlists which only list the words without extensive sample of usage, might lead students into misunderstanding and misinterpretation when using them.
In particular, synonymous verbs are especially very essential in forming sentences. After all, "the verb is very central to the structure of the sentence that no syntactic analysis can proceed without a careful consideration of it" (Palmer, 2014, p.1). Verb carries a fundamental role in a sentence that with the omission of it will result in meaningless phrases. Without a verb, a sentence cannot be formed and will not have any meaning. Different verb conveys different meaning. It is very typical of, in e.g. writers, in avoidance of redundancy to use synonymous verbs. However, synonyms are not interchangeable including synonymous verbs. Hence, it is important to know the nuances of each word.
Until recently, there have been numerous studies investigating near-synonyms of verbs using corpus-based approach. The first corpus-based study on near-synonyms, Hanks (1996), investigates the verbs urge, incite, bother, and, abandon. The study focuses on set apart each verb. Since Hanks" study, another study on near-synonyms of verbs in English language, Li (2019), takes the verbs preserve and conserve as examples to investigate. Unlike Hanks, Li"s study concluded a number of implications of the study"s findings in teaching English as a Foreign Language. Both studies show that corpus-based approach is very reliable and objective in distinguishing a set of near-synonyms, in particular verbs. The present study attempts to extend justification on how corpus is very helpful for EFL students to distinguish a set of near synonymous verbs announce, declare, and state employing corpus-based method and Sketch engine as instrument analysis. This study focuses on collocation, concordance, meanings, and grammatical patterns.

Synonym VS Near-Synonym
Synonyms are two or more words that have very closely related meanings and share the same semantic properties (Rowe & Levine 2016). They can be applied to avoid repetition of the same word over and over. Although these words can often be substituted for each other, however, the research of synonymous groups by Walker (2011) such as run, head, manage or system, process, and procedure demonstrate that these words have slight but significant distinction in meaning influenced by collocation and semantic prosody. One word may be appropriate to be used in a sentence, while its synonym would be odd because of the similarity between them is not the "total sameness" (Yule, 2010). In this sense, synonyms are not roundly identical, and that unidentical meaning between synonyms reveal that they are not completely interchangeable (Liu, 2010). Hence, synonyms with no exact meanings and non-absolute similarity are called near-synonymy. Above all, near-synonymy is essentially required to "choose the right word" in any situation of language production (Edmonds & Hirts, 2002).
According to Edmonds & Hirts (2002), near-synonyms are generally divided into four categories that can be differentiated from any aspect of their meanings. First is a denotational category that includes literal, explicit, and context-independent meaning of the word. Second is a stylistic category that examine pair synonym prompted by the dimensions, whether it is convenient in a formal or informal use, including dialect. Third, expressive category convey expression that following the speaker"s attitude to denote, like the research of Islamiyah & Fajri (2018) towards three adjectives; skinny, slim and thin. Their paper results demonstrate that these adjectives have different connotation. Skinny is often used to reveal negative thing such as reproach. In contrast, slim has positive connotation and mostly used as a compliment to express that someone is "attractively thin", for example. On the other hand, thin tends to have neutral meaning. The word daddy also express stronger speaker"s emotions of intimacy than dad and father. Last, structural category has relation with grammatical matters, including collocation and syntax.

Corpus Linguistics for ELT
Corpus in language sciences refers to a body of written text or transcribed speech which can serve as a basis for linguistic analysis and description as stated by Kennedy (2014). Nowadays, there are many understandings of the term corpus linguistics which is still being debated by linguists. Many scholars believe that corpus linguistics is a method of how to apply corpora in language studies, but others still questioning, whether corpus linguistics is just a method or also as a theoretical framework. Nevertheless, according to Flowerdew (2012), leading corpus linguists agreed that a corpus is a collection of authentic languages, either spoken or written, which have been compiled for a particular purpose. In the 1990s, corpus linguistics has marked an important milestone in the attempt of making corpus works a new mainstream discipline within Language Science (Leon, 2005). Besides, corpora have been recently used in pedagogic and linguistics areas such as translation and discourse studies. As Leon (2005) notes, "what is called 'Corpus Linguistics' covers various heterogeneous fields ranging from lexicography, descriptive linguistics, applied linguistics -language teaching or Natural Language Processing -to domains where corpora are needed because introspection cannot be used, such as studies of language variations, dialects, registers and styles, or magnetic studies" (2005: 36).
There are lot of scholars who used corpora in English Teaching and Learning because corpora have been extremely influential in informing various aspects of pedagogy over the last few years (Flowerdew, 2012). For instance, Islamiyah & Fajri (2019), use corpus-based study of synonym adjectives of Skinny, Slim, and Thin to show differences in expressive meaning, usage, and syntactical pattern. As a result, the study has demonstrated the significance and effectiveness of a corpusbased study in analyzing synonymous adjectives (Iislamiyah & Fajri, 2019). Cheng (2010), also examines that Corpora, corpus-analytic tools and corpus evidence have been increasingly used in English language teaching and learning for the last two decades.
Actually, there are two types of pedagogical corpus application, those are as indirect and direct. According to Flowerdew (2012), indirect corpus application is to inform reference materials and to inform the teaching syllabus and ELT materials. Whereas direct corpus application is for learners and teachers. Indeed, there are several advantages that we can take from applying corpora in ELT. For instances, corpus has helped in the development and critical evaluation of pedagogic skills among student teachers. The development of computerized corpus analysis has made the job of compiling word-frequency statistics far easier than it once was, and has given impetus to a new wave of pedagogically oriented research (Jones & Durrant, 2010).

Methodology
This study is descriptive-qualitative since it carries out thorough description of the data presentation and analysis, and does not regard number or statistics as an entry point of the analysis. This study investigates a set of near synonym verbs declare, state, and announce taken from Oxford Mini Thesaurus in which they are listed as synonyms. The thesaurus book, however, does not offer detailed explanation about when and how we should use each verb. Synonyms are not interchangeable and the lack of explanation could cause users, in this case, EFL students who have not understood about corpus method, to potentially use each word randomly and inappropriately. Besides their relations as synonyms, announce, declare, and state are also on the top 1000 list of most common verbs in English according to WordExample.com.
These verbs are retrieved from British National Corpus (henceforth, BNC) which refers to a 100-million words collection of samples of written and spoken language deriving from a wide range of sources (e.g. academic books, magazine, newspaper, periodicals, and transcriptions of conversations), from 1980s to early 1990s (Hu & Yang, 2015). BNC is chosen because of its comprehensiveness, useful user-friendly search functions, and easy access. This corpus is later equipped by Sketch Engine (henceforth, SkE) to process the data accordingly. Sketch Engine is a leading corpus tool, largely used in lexicography, language teaching, and other study areas (Kilgarriff et al., 2004) that has a number of main functions such as Word Sketch, Thesaurus, and Concordance. To confirm that announce, declare, and state are indeed synonymous words, we use the Thesaurus functions and Word Sketch to gain the collocations of each word, and concordance that allows us to see how and when each word is used.

Frequency and Collocation Analysis
The meticulous computation performed in SkE illustrated that announce, declare and state clearly have different occurrence and frequency. Announce is the most frequently used as illustrated in Table 1. It is nearly 40% higher than state and exactly 50% higher than declare. On the other hand, declare and state are moderately the same. The frequency discrepancy on those verbs might indicate dominant and lessdominant use or appearance in the corpus which later could be helpful in elucidating meaning and usage. Such description of word frequency is followed by the collocation and concordance analysis as illustrated in Table 2 -Table 10 to support the data. Frequency shows how often the word collocated with announce, declare and state whereas the score is indicating how strong the collocation is. The higher the score, the stronger the collocation. A low score means that the words in the collocation also frequently combine with many other words.

Adverb, Subject, and Object Collocation of Announce
Firstly, announce mostly goes together with the adverbs that indicate time and manners. As the data shown in Table 2, the adverbs can be categorized into adverbs of time (shortly, recently, previously, yesterday and subsequently) and adverbs of manners (proudly, officially, formally, publicly and duly). These two adverb categories are the most often collocate with announce as pre-modifier. Nevertheless, that is not a rare thing if the adverbs lie as post-modifier. Objects that mostly come with announce explain the higher frequency of subjects" aim or choice such as intention, plan and decision. It shows that announce is not basically used to directly and unconsciously tell something toward people without any purpose or any plan. In addition, announce also frequently collocated with the objects that related to the domain of employment or something which have formal sense like resignation, retirement, and appointment. It indicates that this verb is often used to intentionally inform people about something, especially in formal way. In the part of collocation with subjects, Table 4 shows that the word government has the highest collocation frequency and score of announce. Besides, the other subjects such ministry, corp and bush strongly indicate that this word is often used by an institution, people who have authority or hold a high position in government or the government itself. Furthermore, these subjects can either be animate (secretary, Lamont, Klerk) or inanimate (yesterday, week, Inc).
This result has demonstrated that syntagmatic relation of announce often takes institutional "body" which brings different spectrum of semantic meaning (Huang & Tsai, 1997). To Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), this typical feature of lexical choice in which announce would collocate might be similar to that of agent concept. Thus, the government or corps, for instance that takes subject position of announce would be best interpreted as to bring authoritative meaning (see table 4).  Intention and aim mean desired things to do or to happen. Dividend here is a term used in a company or business setting. Zone is a spatial term used for either military territory or protected areas. Candidacy is a political term. All words are definitely used for formal setting. terms. Order as in court order is a term used in a trial setting. All words have a formal degree. It turns out that either animate nouns (e.g. a person's name) or inanimate nouns (e.g. resolution, statement, and order) can be a subject of declare.

Adverb, Subject, and Object Collocation of State
The word state is frequently collocated with nouns and verbs since it is a verb. Albeit, adverbs also collocate with state as pre-modifier (e.g. clearly, wrongly) and few of them as post-modifier (e.g. positively, quitely). Besides, the adverbs which describe state can be categorized into adverb of manners such as Explicitly, Categoricall Expressly, and bluntly adverb of degree like specifically, categorically, and publicly. purpose whose demonstrate the objects of state. Furthermore, the words reason, case and opinion related to people"s view, while the objects principle and belief can be a guide of life. In the objects of state, most of them tend to occur in abstract terms such as principle, belief, intention, objective, and preference, then the remains are concrete terms. Table 9. Top 10 collocates objects of state The table illustrates that frequent collocation subject with state is report. It can be observed that the subjects of state can be something formally in written or spoken such as report, document, and letter, or an official announcement such as notice, declaration, and communique. For Bush, Lj, and member are related to someone in law or people of institution. Last, conditional mostly used after the word state like "Certain facts stated by the latter conditionals,.." which is quite different with another frequently collocate subjects of state. It denotes that state rely in a requirement. Those all subjects are concrete terms because it can be physically seen or heard.

Dimensions of Meaning around announce, declare, and state
The wide range of different collocation of near synonymous adjective announce, declare, and state supports the notion that they synonymous word are not always interchangeable (Islamiyah & Fajri, 2019). Moreover, they have subtle different semantic meaning that non-native English speakers should be aware of. We further make use of Oxford Learner"s Pocket Dictionary (2008) to demonstrate the semantic meaning. First, announce means to make something known publicly according to the dictionary. Drawing upon the collocation items of this verb, it is used to make the public know about personal intentions (such as intention and plan), and/or final settlement (such as decision and resignation). Besides, as shown in Table 11, announce can be used to introduce people"s name and officially tell people about something like engagement. In extent, announce also generally used to give information in public place such as airport and railway station through a loudspeaker, whereas that is non sense to use declare or state. As clearly seen in the table above, the word announce tend to carry out assertive utterance (Kreidler, 1998) since it focuses on information giving. According Bergler (1991), moreover, the semantic field of announce has high "strength of complement" (p. 8) and thus often has specific context, for instance, level of formality and specific audience. The present result thus corroborates the earlier finding which stated that near synonymous words are always substitutable.
In addition to the semantic feature of announce, the word declare in this observation means to say something officially or "formally". Declare a war on/against can literally mean to start a battle against an opponent. The phrase can also mean to eradicate something harmful, in this case golf course as what environmentalists believe as a threat to the environment. Declare war on/against has become a fixed expression and word declare in the phrase can"t be substituted with its near synonyms, announce and state. To declare a war that is presented by the agent, for instance, government, country official, the president, could exploit the serious intention and degree of "formality". The recipient, therefore, would interpret it as facing a severe condition where war could possibly happen. In contrast to announce, whenever used in the similar position, to announce a war thus means to inform readers that the agent in this case aims to make a war with somebody/countries. The meaning seems to be less "serious" and could be presupposed as to have a kind of psywar. Unlike Bergler"s (1993) observation to announce and declare, the undergoing examination to these words do not seem equivalent. Nonetheless, it does agree that both could be used in formal context (cf. Bergler, 1991;1993).
In regard with the function, declare is used to make known a serious matter such as independence and an emergency. Especially, the phrase "declare one's independence' is permanent and declare here cannot be substituted with another word as substitution will result in changing the sense. Moreover, declare has also manifested into an idiomatic expression, "declare an interest' which translates into telling people that you are connected with something that is being discussed. The expression is also fixed and the word declare cannot be replaced. Such semantic feature of declare and announce might be best illustrated through the object collocation like war in the example. In this case, the sentence "Finland join force with Nazi declare war on Russia" carries out semantic association of reporting verb. On the other ward, it means that they are, Finland and Nazi declare that their army are at the state of war. To substitute declare with announce for instance, will bring idea that they are not in the time of war against Russia but intend to do so soon in the future.
Third, state means to formally write or say something, especially clearly and fully. According to scrutiny of random concordance lines of each item, state is frequently used when speakers want to convey something truth. The truth can be proven by data, research, or news report. As shown on the table, state collocates with "subject" such as report, voters (in law context), and institution. Hence, it means that state used in formal contexts like other two words observerd here. This evidence also can be proven by indicate the whole meaning of the context of each item. For example on the third row, which is the keywords show that this sentence is in formal context are sovereignity and legitimacy. The observation to the word state in the present study is closely affiliated with that of Bergler"s (1993) claim that it could be used in formal context. However, the word state has different degree of strength that announce or declare but is higher than say. She further argues state could express meaning to be known by public. Thus, the first example in table 13 might be understood as to "inform" so that stakeholders what happened.

Grammatical Patterns
The differences of announce, declare and state can be analyzed through grammatical patterns. As Gu (2017) said that in Sketch Engine, BNC (British national Corpus) is one of the sub-corpora and Sketch Diff function that offers collocation difference and also gives more explanation how to use each word in a proper grammatical pattern by utilizing concordance lines. The details analysis will be given as followings. (Oxford Dictionary, 2008, p. 15). Table. 14 Selected concordances of announce 1. The USA and the UK announce that naval vessels are being sent to the Gulf 2.

Announce (vt.) make sth known publicly
It was then announced from Cairo that all countries would be repr 3.
Japan announces it will provide US $1,000 million to assist the multi 4.
France announces water restrictions

5.
Magic Carpet Travel announce with pride the opening of an entirely new sunshine holiday area 6.
British Columbia has announced plans to allow logging to continue in the ancient temperate r 7.
es industry executives saying that the trio plan to announce by the end of the month that th Possible patterns of Announce a. announce + sth as in 4 b. announce + that + clause as in 1 c. announce + from + sth as in 2 d. announce + S + V as in 3 e. announce + with as in 5 f. announce + sth + V.inf + sth as in 6 g. announce + sb + V.inf + sb as in 8 h. announce + sth + for + sth as in 10 i. announce + by + sb as in 7 j. announce + by + sth as in 9 The analysis above show that announce can lie in the various grammatical patterns.
Patterns a, f and h (announce + sth + …) present that announce is mostly followed by sth (something), means that it is a transitive verb which needs object. Furthermore, announce can be followed by that-clause, prepositions (from, with, by), and also sb (somebody) as the selected concordances no. 1, 2 and 8. It also can occasionally occur in the active and passive sentences as in selected concordances no. 3 and 9. However, announce which directly followed by for and to-infinitive was not discovered from the concordance lines. Declare is a transitive verb which means that an object must follow after the verb as shown in concordance lines no. 11 and 14. Thus, pattern declare + sth is formulated accordingly. Prepositions can follow after declare + sth pattern and form a new pattern, declare + sth + preposition. However, this pattern is not absolute and a preposition is optional depending on the writers" need. We also would like to highlight that different nouns are followed by a different preposition. For example, war is mostly followed by on/against and independence is usually followed by in if the writer wants to give additional information about the time. Declare in a sentence can also be a complex transitive verb as shown by concordance lines no. 16 and 20. Thus, the pattern declare + sth + adj. and declare + reflexive pronoun + adj. are formulated. Moreover, subordinate that-clause can follow after declare, thus, the pattern declare + that + S +V and declare + that + if clause are created. Dictionary, 2008, p. 434).

State (vt) formally write or say something, especially clearly and fully. (Oxford
v verb + sth + adj.
v verb + that + if clause v verb + reflexive pronoun + adj. - The comparison table above illustrates that announce, declare, and state have similarities and differences in their grammatical patterns. First similar pattern of the three words are verb + sth and which indicates that the three of them are all transitive verb and takes direct object. Second same pattern is verb + that + S + V. The rest are the differences. Pattern verb + from + sth is only owned by announce, if the verb substituted with declare and state, it would be ungrammatical. Commonly, state is followed by for if it has a function as noun, like in sentence "He's the Secretary of State for Energy or Minister for Energy'. In addition, note that some other patterns probably exist in a larger corpus. In particular, declare is the only one who takes pattern verb + sth + adj. which indicates declare is a complex transitive verb.

Corpus linguistics for the teaching of near synonymy in ELT context
Corpus-based approaches to ELT (English Learning and Teaching) provides learners with abundant advantages. Our study on near-synonym, announce, declare, and state confirms that they are not interchangeable thus teaching students to use them merely from dictionary is not sufficient. Besides, students also should understand their collocation, dimension of meaning, and grammatical pattern to be able to use them appropriately in either speaking or writing. The pedagogical implication of corpus linguistics to English Language Teaching is of evidence proof towards the need to the update and upgrade the teaching and learning method in the classroom. By using corpora, learners can not only enhance linguistic skills of speaking and listening, but reading and writing as well. Furthermore, a research conducted on Chinese and American students proved that when using corpus-based approach, students get an increased critical understanding of grammar, which makes learning more interesting and effective (Liu & Jiang, 2009).
Walker (2011) substantiated the efficiency of using corpora. In the first case study is explained that a senior German manager, Doctor T, takes 40 hours of one-to-one training with an experienced English teacher. Doctor T wants to prepare his presentation to the native speaker workforce. Because of Doctor T has a high standard in English, he got confused to choose the appropriate word of run, manage, or head to introduce himself as the manager of Human Resources Division. He asked to his teacher and to explain those things, the teacher uses corpus-based approach to see the most relevant word that can relate to management style. According to the data of corpora, the most appropriate one is manage. Hence, the teacher should sugge st him to use utterances such as I manage the Human Resources Division and avoid phrases like I run the Human Resources Division. From this case, it can be proven that corpus can increase or make him more understand to use the exact vocabulary in his interests in English.
Despite its capability to provides complex data, not all of the level learners can wellunderstood how to use corpora in a proper way. This statement is strengthened by Islamiyah & Fajri (2019) who said that English learners whose English proficiency in average might feel overwhelmed to absorb all the information which is given by the corpora. However, since the traditional way of teaching by using dictionary is limited to expound near synonyms, the presence of corpora will help students to find out not only near synonyms, but also the grammatical patterns and collocations. Nevertheless, it should be underlined that only appropriate materials that can use by the intermediate students as mentioned before, also the English student"s level and purpose of English learning should be considered in organizing corresponding classroom activities (Gu, 2017). Therefore, before students study corpora, they should educate and train properly in order to boost their skills and knowledge in using corpora effectively (Zahra & Abbas, 2018).
In similar vein, the teachers also can use corpora to do a research in near synonyms. Hence, they can explain thoroughly in detail to their students. Besides that, corpusbased approach can be used in linguistics research which discuss more complex study such as syntax, semantic, pragmatics and other macro linguistics. Corpusbased approach gives frequently used lexical items, which are interpreted in various contexts. It is demonstrated relevant uses of phrasal verbs, idioms, synonyms and antonyms and meanings (Zahra & Abbas, 2018).

Conclusion
In conclusion, the study investigating a set of near synonyms announce, declare, and state confirmed that these verbs are somewhat different in terms of meaning"s nuance and grammatical pattern. The study also has proven the reliability of corpusassisted study to learn about words" meaning and usage in text. We hope that teacher can implement corpus in teaching vocabulary in class. Students" independence of operating and utilizing a corpus tool like Sketch Engines is preferable.