Abstract: Adverbs play an important part in syntax as well as in communication. As a subtype of adverbs, downtoners help to emphasize the main ideas of one’s utterances and indicate the tone and attitudes of the speakers. However, up until now the studies of downtoners are small in number and the perspectives of these studies are very limited. The current paper intends to study synonymous downtoners with almost, nearly, practically as targets from the perspective of extended units of meaning which offers us a more scientific and profound way to study synonyms. The result of the research indicates that the three targets have obvious differences in their collocations and colligations, and they are similar in semantic preference and semantic prosody. In view of the research findings, the author suggests: firstly, teachers and students should pay more attention to the distinctions of synonyms while teaching and studying synonymous words; secondly, lexicographers should put much emphasis on the explanations of differences between synonyms; thirdly, researchers should carry out their research on words from the perspective of extended units of meaning so as to study words in a more comprehensive and systematic way. |
