语言中存在的同义词,在句法结构和语义范围上存在着差异,它们的区别使用也仅靠母语的语感,因此对外汉语中留学生的误用情况很普遍。就误用较普遍的一组汉英对应同义词"美丽"、"漂亮"与"beautiful"、"pretty",以《人民日报》和近现代英文版小说为自然语料进行随机检索、计量统计和对比分析,既对"美丽"、"漂亮"进行汉语内部的横向对比,又同"beautiful"、"pretty"进行汉英纵向对比,通过辨析它们充当不同句子成分的频率和与不同类型名词的搭配使用等,找出它们的内在区别和联系,为对外教学中可能出现的类似问题找出一种解决方法。Synonyms are different in terms of syntactic structure and semantic scope and the only way of differentiating them is through the linguistic sense got from one's native language, which is the reason why the international students tend to make mistakes while using them. As to the synonyms that are most commonly used in a wrong way-"美丽", "漂亮" and their English equivalences "beautiful" and "pretty", the article searches them randomly and counts them and compares them on the basis of the natural data bank---People's Daily and some contemporary and modern English novels. Then the article compares "美丽" and "漂亮" inside Chinese and at the same time compares them with their English equivalences "beautiful" and "pretty", trying to find their intrinsic differences and association by way of comparing and analyzing the different frequency of the words used as different sentence elements and their collocation with different nouns. In the end the article concludes with a solution to the similar problems arise in Chinese teaching
