A Corpus-Based Study on the Lexical Priming of Synonyms: Taking Evaluate and Assess as Examples

This paper is intended to differentiate a pair of English synonyms 'evaluate' and 'assess' based on Lexical Priming Theory in terms of their collocation and colligation. The study shows that there are differences and similarities in the objects, adverbial modifiers, sentence patterns and co-occurring verbs of these two words, which gives the implication that English teachers and learners can employ corpus to extend the explanations in the textbook so that English learners can master and use English with more flexibility.