Vocabulary teaching and verbal synonymy: a contrastive study of two pairs of verbs in French

This article is devoted to the study of two pairs of verbs in French: on the one hand éliminer (qqch) / supprimer (qqch), which are weakly synonymous, and on the other hand mettre fin à (qqch) / mettre un terme à (qqch), which are strongly synonymous. It shows how to perform (using a corpus) an indirect measurement of the degree of verbal synonymy based on the analysis of the semantic interaction between verb and noun. It then characterizes the contextual functioning of these constructions.