A Corpus-Based Study of the Near-Synonyms: Tourist, Traveler, and Visitor for ESP Classrooms
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Abstract
This study investigates the near-synonyms tourist, traveler, and visitor by examining their contextual usage and collocational behavior. Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the analysis focuses on genre distribution, formality, collocations, semantic preference, and semantic prosody. The findings show that tourist is commonly used in structured contexts such as academic writing and journalism, while traveler appears more frequently in narrative and lifestyle contexts. For visitor, it is the most frequent and versatile term, occurring across both formal and informal settings. Collocational patterns further reveal distinct semantic associations for each word, reflecting their specialized meanings. These results have important implications for English language teaching, particularly in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), by supporting more precise and context-sensitive vocabulary instruction. The study highlights the value of extending near-synonym research to specialized domains, especially for learners in the tourism industry.
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