10 “the individual forms words of a corpus.” In this study, token is any instance of
the words refuse and reject in COCA.
11
CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter consists of two subchapters: theoretical description and theoretical framework. Theoretical description presents the theories related to this
study matter. Theoretical framework discusses all of the major relevant theories to assist the researcher in answering the research problems.
A. Theoretical Description
Theoretical description gives a clear description of the theories related to the topic of this study. It presents theories about word classes, semantics,
synonymy, corpus linguistics, the role of collocation, and previous corpus studies.
1. Word Classes
Word classes or parts of speech or lexical categories are a set of language categories for classifying words Bloor Bloor, 2004. There are eight word
classes in English: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, determiner, preposition, and conjunction.
a. Verb
Verb is a word class which contains words referring to actions Davies Elder, 2006. According to Davies and Elder 2006, in English, verbs are used for
tense marking. Consider these sentences: 1 John eats three apples; 2 Jean walked
home. Those sentences have the endings, -s and -ed in the verbs eat and walk.
The endings after the verbs are named inflections Aarts, 1997. Inflections
12 express grammatical properties. The
–s ending in eats indicates that the verb is in the present tense, so that it is called a present tense inflection Aarts, 1997. Aarts
1997 adds that the –ed ending shows that walked is in the past tense, therefore it
is called a past tense inflection. According to Aarts 1997, there are two forms of verb: finite verb, a verb
which takes tense; and nonfinite verb, a verb which does not take tense. The example of finite verb is in this sentence, He painted the wall. The finite verb of
that sentence is painted. Next, the example of nonfinite verb presented in this sentence, She loves singing. The word singing is nonfinite verb of that sentence.
Verbs can be differentiated by how many nouns arguments they are connected with. Based on Davies and Elder 2006, there are three types of verb:
intransitive, transitive and ditransitive. Intransitive is a verb which only takes one argument. Take for instance, in the sentence, Peter died. The verb died is
intransitive because it takes only one argument, Peter. According to Carstairs- McCarthy 2002, intransitive verbs are verbs which lack such an object. Take for
instance, in Tex studies, Tex is a subject and studies is a verb, which describes the action what the subject does. There is no more information about what the subject
studies. The second type of verb is transitive. Transitive is a verb which takes two
arguments Davies Elder, 2006. For example in a sentence, The hunter kills a wolf
. The verb kills has two arguments, which are the hunter and a wolf. Therefore, the verb kills is transitive. Carstairs-McCarthy 2002 adds that
transitive verbs or verbs which are used transitively are ones with an „object‟
