Earticle

This paper aims to investigate the semantic differences between the French near-synonyms type and genre through a corpus-based distributional analysis and explains these differences in terms of categorization strategies. Although both words denote “type” or “kind” and are often considered interchangeable, actual language use reveals distinct collocational and distributional patterns. Using a large-scale French corpus from Sketch Engine, this study analyzes major syntactic environments of type and genre, including type/genre de + N constructions, modifier combinations, and subject/object positions, based on logDice and ΔlogDice measures. The results show that type tends to function as an objective and structural classificatory category, whereas genre reflects a more interpretive and convention-based categorization associated with cultural and discourse contexts. These differences appear consistently across syntactic environments. This study demonstrates that corpus-based distributional analysis provides an effective approach for explaining semantic distinctions between near-synonyms in terms of categorization patterns.