43 The researcher selected purposive samples, which was sufficient to provide
minimum insight and understanding of what the researcher was studying Ary, et al
., 2010. Ary, et al.2010 said that purposive samples had to be relevant to the topic of the study. To do the sampling, the researcher used her experience and
knowledge, specially which was related to this study. Thus, the tokens used had to represent all meanings of the verbs refuse and reject. Moreover, the collocations
of the verbs would present the meanings and contexts they took place. The analysis would be conducted based on the definitions on the dictionaries and the
related references mentioned in Chapter II.
F. Research Procedure
There were six steps to conduct this study. Ary, et al. 2010 gave the steps to conduct qualitative study. The first step was specifying the phenomenon to be
investigated. In this study, the researcher wanted to investigate the synonymous verbs, refuse and reject by corpus study. The researcher was going to find out the
frequencies of the verbs refuse and reject and the collocations of the verbs. The collocations would show the meanings of those verbs which might have similar or
different contexts in use. By the guidance from Ary, et al. 2010, the second step was selecting the
source from which the observations were to be made. The researcher chose COCA as the source of the data in this study. The researcher used a laptop to browse
COCA site to take the tokens of the verbs refuse and reject. Next, the researcher would copy the tables of the tokens because the tokens could not be downloaded.
44 After doing it, the third step was classifying the data Ary, et al., 2010.
The data were classified into two: the data of the tokens of the verb refuse and the data of the tokens of the verb reject. The data would be presented in the form of
table to ease the researcher to see it. Then, it was selected 100 tokens for each verb to be digged more in the next step. The researcher highlighted the
occurrences of the synonymous verbs and their collcoations in every token. After that, the forth step was analyzing the data Ary, et al., 2010. The
theories in Chapter II would help to analyze the data. The analyzing focused on the frequencies and the collocations of the verbs refuse and reject. Thus, the
researcher would find whether those verbs had similar or different collocations which occurred in the similar or different contexts.
Then, the fifth step was drawing conclusions Ary, et al., 2010. After analyzing the data, the researcher would find the conclusions. The conclusions
answered the research problems of this study. The sixth step was reporting the result of this study Ary, et al., 2010. The
researcher would make the report in a form of a thesis. Besides, there would be recommendations for readers.
45
CHAPTER IV RESEARCH RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This chapter consists of two sections based on the results and the findings. The first section describes the frequencies of the verbs refuse and reject. The
second section discusses the collocations of the verbs refuse and reject related to the context meanings.
A. The Frequencies of the Verbs Refuse and Reject
To conduct this study, the data needed were taken from COCA. The tokens of the verbs refuse and reject were from 2011 to 2012. It would be a discussion
about the comparison of the frequencies of the verbs refuse and reject. It would be seen which one of the verbs that was used the most.
The words refuse and reject in COCA were not classified into the word classes. Thus, in the lists of each word, refuse and reject could occur as a noun
and as a verb. This was the table of the occurrences frequencies of refuse and reject
in COCA 2011 – 2012.
Table 4.1 The Frequencies of Refuse and Reject in COCA 2011 – 2012
Word Frequency
Total 2011
2012 refuse
288 146
434 reject
217 93
310
Table 4.1 above showed that refuse had more number of occurrences than reject
from 2011 to 2012. Refuse occurred 288 times in 2011 and 146 times in
