A corpus-based study of English synonyms: chance and oportunity

Abstract

The study aims to investigate differences and similarities of two synonymous nouns, chance and opportunity. The sources of data were from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and online dictionaries. The study applied mixed methodology in both quantitative and qualitative aspects. The overall frequency was investigated to find the distributions of the two nouns across the five text types in COCA, which are spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Opportunity was used most frequently in academic texts and was least found in fiction. On the other hand, chance least occurred in the genre of academic text and was found most in the spoken genre. The claim that opportunity tends to be used more often in formal style than its near synonym was supported by a number of academic words in the lists of its collocates. Although a wider range of meanings of chance reflects its polysemous status, chance and its collocates have fewer semantic preferences than those of opportunity.