The Benefits of Learning Collocations
35 According to theory of meanings,
refuse
and
reject
can be examined using collocative meaning and denotative meaning. Collocative meaning underlies the
analysis of the verbs
refuse
and
reject
. To obtain rich interpretation of the use of the verbs
refuse
and
reject
, it is given the definitions of each verb. They will support the discussion in this study. The dictionaries mention that
refuse
and
reject
are counted as synonyms that share similar ideas of the senses. Denotative meaning is used to distinguish the definition of the synonymous words.
O’Grady,
et al
. 2010 say that denotative meaning is one of the parts of semantics study which endeavors to equate the meaning of a word or a phrase with the units to
which it refers. However, the similar words are not able to substitute one to another. Thus, this study takes theory of synonyms which gives a clear description
of the synonym degree of
refuse
and
reject
. The analysis of the verbs is employed by corpus linguistics approach,
especially semantics, which refers to “an approach to studying language in which
observational data from large text collections are used as the main evidence for the uses and the meaning of words and phrases” Stubbs, 2001, p.23. Therefore,
this study needs a corpus which provides the data of the verbs
refuse
and
reject
. The tokens of the verbs
refuse
and
reject
are obtained from COCA that offers some options to the study matter. The tokens will show the occurrences of the
combination of words McEnery Wilson, 2001. Combination of words signifies the collocation of the synonymous verbs. To investigate the senses of
words, it can be looked at their collocates collocation Biber,
et al
., 2002. They add that
“there is a strong tendency for each collocate of a word to be associated
36 with a single sense or meaning although more than one collocate can be
associated with that same sense ” p.35. Moreover, by looking at the common
collocations of each verb, it can be an effective and efficient way to analyze the senses of the verbs
refuse
and
reject
. Thus, it will be known whether the verbs have similar contexts in meanings based on the similar collocations.