A corpus-based analysis of English synonymous verbs: help, aid, and assist

The study investigates three synonymous verbs help, aid, and assist, focusing on the similarities and the differences in their senses of meaning, degrees of formality, and collocations in relation to semantic preference. The online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) were used, along with the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for comparation analyses. The results revealed that the three synonymous verbs share the same core meaning; however, their senses of meaning differ slightly. In terms of the degree of formality, help is frequently used in informal contexts, while aid and assist are more common in formal contexts. Regarding the noun and adverb collocations, the top-20 frequency lists with an MI score ≥ 3 were classified according to their semantic preference. It was discovered that aid and assist share some noun collocations, whereas help does not share any noun collocations with them. While there are no shared adverb collocations among the three target verbs, help and aid share three collocates, and aid and assist have six shared adverb collocations. Notably, these target synonyms are considered near-synonyms; although they have similar meanings, they cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. This corpus-based study offers valuable lexical insights into synonyms and carries significant pedagogical implications. Because a corpus can offer deeper insights into synonyms than traditional dictionaries, it may encourage English teachers and learners to use corpora as a complementary resource alongside dictionaries.