The lexical patterns in reference to the near-synonyms reveal some interesting points. There are only two lexical patterns of the collocation nouns
which are religion belief and governmental-related. The near-synonym forbid is not only used in governmental-related but also in religion belief. Whereas prohibit
is only used in governmental-related lexical patterns. The analysis of the nominal collocations of the near-synonyms revealed
some interesting insights to the usage patterns. However Liu 2010, p. 64 states raw frequencies privilege words that have an overall high frequency in the corpus,
yet it undervalues those have a lower general frequency but occur habitually with one of the near-synonyms. Therefore, the next step is to investigate and describe
the nominal collocations measured by MI-score.
3. Nominal Collocations Measured by MI-score
The MI-score is a statistical measurement that indicates collocates of lexical items which have a rather low overall frequency in the corpus but which
are co-occurring repeatedly with the node. An MI-score around 0 suggests that the two words do not collocate while a score of 3 or higher indicates that the two
items often co-occur. Liu 2010 p. 74 states the MI-score is considered to be the most appropriate statistical measurement for this research because it favors the
category of content words to which adjectives belong. The results were sorted by relevance which is the term in the COCA for the MI-score.
The collocation analysis for the near-synonyms measured by the MI-score ejected completely different nouns than the measurement with raw frequencies.
Table 2.5 depicts the top result of the nominal collocation analyses measured by MI-score.
Table 2.5 Top lists of nouns modified most frequently by prohibit and forbid measured by MI-score
forbid prohibit
heaven 8.65
ordinances 8.07
god 7.51
regulations 6.81
laws 5.15
laws 6.71
amendment 4.59
statutes 6.69
rules 4.57
clause 6.06
Table 2.5 demonstrates that there is a single overlap of collocating nouns modified by the near-synonyms which is laws. We had two words with the
collocations measured by raw frequencies which are laws and rules and only one with the MI-score which is laws. This indicates that each near-synonym has its
specific nominal collocations which the definitions of the near-synonym in the dictionaries should include since it is evidence that the presumable near-synonyms
are not all intersubstitutable but have their fixed collocations and expressions. For further deatail, the following is the example collected from COCA.
[1] They explain that local ordinances prohibit artificial lighting near beaches.
[2] Regulations prohibit her from stopping at any points. [3] Heaven forbid if he woke the girls
