DIFFERENTIATING THE NEAR-SYNONYMS USING A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH: BOOKING VS RESERVATION

Precise use of near-synonymous vocabulary is essential for effective communication in the service industry, where subtle lexical distinctions can influence clarity, professionalism, and pragmatic appropriateness across different contexts. This study examined the corpus data pertaining to the synonymous terms booking and reservation to determine whether they are interchangeable in all contexts. The study explores variations in formality, genre distribution, collocations, grammatical patterns, semantic preferences, and semantic prosody. Data were sourced from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings indicate that reservation is more formal, as it has higher Words Per Million values in formal genre. When examining collocates with an MI Score ≥3 and a frequency of occurrence of five or more, it was found that these two words shared only 12 out of 110 collocates. However, the two near-synonyms share all semantic preferences but have differing proportions of collocations covering each semantic field, particularly in some fields, namely SERVICE, IT AND COMPUTING, QUANTITY, and CERTAINTY. In terms of semantic prosody and colligation, the two near-synonyms show no significant differences, but it is interesting to note that the grammatical pattern “make + reservation” is used to a greater extent than “make + booking. It is recommended that L2 learners of English be familiarized with these similarities and differences of both synonyms to use English naturally and effectively in both general and industry-specific contexts within the service industry.