In order to enhance the effectiveness of students' learning behavior through teaching, it is necessary to investigate the differences between competent and less competent teachers' teaching practices. Furthermore, it is also important to examine various w

The purpose of this study is to explore the different collocations in English communication verbs, such as say and tell through a corpus-based analysis. Although the verbs say and tell are synonymous, they select different DP objects such as say a prayer or tell a lie. So those differences are explained in terms of collocation. In order to understand the difference of collocational patterns between the verbs say and tell, I attempted to verify them by reading and examining a corpus. The analysis should be useful in understanding collocation since it is based on empirical data. The results show that say is collocated with DPs whose semantic properties have such specific linguistic content as anything, word, hello, hey, hi, etc. that agrees with the semantic field of say. Meanwhile, tell is collocated with the DPs whose semantic properties have the specific linguistic content of facts or information like story, truth, difference, tale, etc. that agrees with the semantic field of tell. This study shows that the semantic properties of nominal objects which are selected by the verb say or tell play an important role in understanding collocationally synonymous as well as different.