Collocation and Semantic Prosody of Synonimy in French: magnifique and superbe

Abstract : This paper aims to find the differences of two near-synonym in French, especially in term of its collocation distribution and semantic prosody. Two French adjectives, extraordinaire and remarquable which have the same core meaning, are the object of this analysis. Corpus linguistic method was used in collecting data from French corpora in Leipzig Corpora Collection and AntConc tool was used to obtain their collocates and their frequency of occurrence. Meaning aura or semantic prosody provides knowledge about the nuances caused by each adjective in a particular context. The results of the analysis show that magnifique and superbe show many similarities in meaning because they have high colloquial similarity, but there are still differences that can be used as distinguishing aspects of the two adjectives. The semantic prosody of magnifique shows a very positive nuance, while superbe can produce positive and neutral nuances.