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A corpus-based study of similes in British and American English
Hussein, Riyad F1, Sawalha, Majdi2.
This study aimed to investigate the forms of similes and the types of nouns following them and
their frequency in different simile constructions. It also unveils the implications that can be
drawn from the findings for English as Foreign Language (EFL) learning contexts. More
specifically, this study attempts to find out the most frequent nouns following similes in different
constructions in two generalized corpora, namely the British National Corpus (BNC) and the
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). These similes were identified, retrieved
and ranked in a descending order according to their frequencies per one million words. Results
indicate that similes, unlike other multi-word units are changeable as different nouns with
varying frequencies ranging from one to fifty three were shown to follow each of the similes
under investigation. For instance, frequencies of nouns following the simile as good as were as
follows: gold (53), (the) people (30), men (14), money (9), and cash (8). These results stood in
contrast to the beliefs and opinions of some native speakers of English who view similes as
fixed forms, very much like formulaic expressions and thus associated exclusively with certain
nouns. The study calls on teachers and instructors to take these findings into account when
teaching similes in the EFL context. Additional research is recommended on other similes such
as, as sweet as sugar and as cold as ice, for instance in BNC and COCA to confirm or invalidate
the findings reported in this research.
Affiliation:
- University of Jordan, Jordan
- University of Jordan, Jordan
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