Negotiating the Meaning of Grammatical Constructions With Some English Confusables

The meanings of words depend on the way they pattern into pharses and sentencesand how they are used in situational contexts, the development of a theory of meaningbeing the central programme of ’corpus semantics’.The meaning relations between the terms in grammatical constructions is as interesting asuseful to study in foreign language teaching , so much the more as the surface structure canbe misleading .Due to the difficulties and misunderstandings brought about by the Englishconfusables (troublesome words) in text analysis, translation practice and oral interpreting ,some lexical items (confusables) are analysed in this paper. We consider such an analysisvery useful since confusables are sources of semantic ambiguity and translation traps.