A Corpus-Based Study of English Synonymous Nouns: Teenager, Minor, Youth, and Adolescent

Papapin Rattanarot; Anchana Sriraungrith; Natchaya Humna; Sapolachet Prachumchai

A Corpus-Based Study of English Synonymous Nouns: Teenager, Minor, Youth, and Adolescent

ผู้แต่ง

Papapin Rattanarot English Program, Phetchabun Rajabhat University
Anchana Sriraungrith English Program, Phetchabun Rajabhat University
Natchaya Humna English Program, Phetchabun Rajabhat University
Sapolachet Prachumchai สาขาวิชาภาษาอังกฤษ คณะมนุษยศาสตร์และสังคมศาสตร์ มหาวิทยาลัยราชภัฏเพชรบูรณ์

คำสำคัญ:

corpus-based study, near-synonymous nouns, Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), semantic prosody, collocational analysis

บทคัดย่อ

Although Teenager, Minor, Youth, and Adolescent are often treated as interchangeable terms for young people, corpus evidence suggests otherwise. This study compares the four nouns through lexicographic analysis and corpus-based methods, drawing on definitions from Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage alongside frequency, genre, collocation, and prosody data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Roughly 200 concordance lines per noun were sampled for semantic preference and prosody analysis. Youth and Adolescent cluster heavily in academic prose (120.44 and 59.73 occurrences per million words), Teenager dominates news and media, and Minor is concentrated in legal and formal registers. Collocational patterns show Minor linked to legal protection, Adolescent to clinical and developmental discourse, and Teenager to social and behavioral themes. Youth and Teenager carry mostly positive semantic prosody, while Minor and Adolescent remain largely neutral. None of the four nouns proves freely substitutable for another, a finding with implications for EFL instruction, vocabulary indexing, and language tool development.

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ดาวน์โหลด

เผยแพร่แล้ว

2026-11-01

รูปแบบการอ้างอิง

Rattanarot, P., Sriraungrith, A., Humna, N., & Prachumchai, S. (2026). A Corpus-Based Study of English Synonymous Nouns: Teenager, Minor, Youth, and Adolescent. วารสารศึกษาครุทรรศน์ , 1(5), 53–68. สืบค้น จาก https://so18.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/JESs/article/view/2759