A Corpus-Based Distinction of the Meaning and Use in among [Accurate vs. Exact vs. Precise] by means of Binary Opposition Strategy

The purpose of this study is to distinguish the meanings and usages of near-synonyms such as Accurate, Exact and Precise. Binary opposition(BO) strategy (Kim 2014a), which focuses on a pair of contextual opposition features such as [effect vs. cause], [part vs. whole], and intrinsic vs. extrinsic], etc., is used to analyze the differences of the usages and meanings between a pair of near-synonyms. The results of this study show thatⅰ) there is a big difference in the frequency of occurrence of the three near-synonyms in the COCA corpus, ⅱ) ACCURATE is highly related to the BO features such as [+true value], [+result], [+error], EXACT to [+true value], [+result], [-error] and the last one PRECISE to [-true value], [-result], [+error]. The three words tend to co-occur with different nouns and adverbs.