The Usage of Because of-Words in British National Corpus

Synonymy is an important yet intricate linguistic feature in the field of lexical semantics. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this paper explores the collocational behavior and semantic prosodies of near synonyms in virtue of, owing to, thanks to, as a result of, due to and because of. The results show that these near synonyms differ in their collocational behavior and semantic prosodies. The pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.