Corpus linguistics is a branch of linguistics concerned with compiling naturally occurring language data in electronic form and analyzing it systematically. A corpus is understood as a collection of authentic texts that is sufficiently representative to support reliable generalizations about a linguistic unit or variety. The methodological value of corpora lies in their scale and authenticity, which provide extensive empirical evidence that can validate claims that might otherwise rely on subjective intuition. This empirical orientation is especially important for synonym research because near-synonyms often differ in collocation, phraseological behavior, stylistic distribution, pragmatic constraints, and evaluative meaning, distinctions that are not always visible in dictionary definitions. This paper presents a corpus-based research design for analyzing Uzbek and English action-verb synonym sets through a combined methodology: monolingual corpora are used for intralingual semantic profiling, while a custom parallel corpus is compiled for translation-equivalent analysis. The study operationalizes lexical–semantic distinctions via collocation measures (Mutual Information and t-score), multiword pattern extraction aligned with the idiom principle, semantic prosody analysis using a two-stage procedure, and reliability control through Cohen’s kappa. In addition, validity safeguards based on corpus representativeness, normalization, and dispersion are integrated into the analysis. The translation component follows corpus-based translation studies and descriptive translation studies frameworks to quantify translation equivalents, identify asymmetries, and interpret translation strategy tendencies.

Corpus linguistics, synonymy, near-synonyms

Apresyan, Y. D. (1995). Selected works. Volume I: Lexical semantics. Moscow: Shkola “Yazyki russkoy kultury”.

Baker, M. (1995). Corpora in translation studies: An overview and some suggestions for future research. Target, 7(2), 223–243.

Baker, M. (1996). Corpus-based translation studies: The challenges that lie ahead. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.

Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20(1), 37–46.

Cruse, D. A. (1986). Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davies, M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990–present. Available online.

Evert, S. (2005). The statistics of word cooccurrences: Word pairs and collocations (Doctoral dissertation). University of Stuttgart.

Gries, S. T. (2008). Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 403–437.

Hojiev, A. (1985). O‘zbek tilida sinonimlar. Toshkent: Fan.

Johansson, S. (2007). Seeing through multilingual corpora: On the use of corpora in contrastive studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kennedy, G. (1998). An introduction to corpus linguistics. London: Longman.

Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., Rychlý, P., & Suchomel, V. (2014). The Sketch Engine: Ten years on. Lexicography, 1(1), 7–36.

Laviosa, S. (2002). Corpus-based translation studies: Theory, findings, applications. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Louw, B. (1993). Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In M. Baker, G. Francis, & E. Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair (pp. 157–176). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shoabdurahmonov, Sh. (1999). O‘zbek leksikologiyasi. Toshkent: O‘qituvchi.

Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive translation studies and beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

To‘ychiyeva, D. (2020). Korpus lingvistikasi asoslari. Toshkent.

Church, K. W., & Hanks, P. (1990). Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography. Computational Linguistics, 16(1), 22–29.

Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.