A semantic prosody analysis of two adjective synonymous pairs (secure & stable and vulnerable & susceptible) in COCA

This study aimed to investigate the semantic prosodies and the interchangeability of the two adjective synonymous pairs secure & stable and vulnerable & susceptible chosen from academic core word list in COCA. Obtaining the data from COCA corpus, this study found that secure & stable contain particularly positive semantic prosodies while vulnerable & susceptible are associated with negative semantic prosodies. Despite each pair’s similar denotational meanings, each pair shares different most co-occurred collocates, so they are considered to be only near synonyms and cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts.