A Comparative Analysis of Think Over and Consider Through BNC, COCA, and ChatGPT

Abstract

This article aims to provide an in-depth comparative analysis of think over and consider through the British National Corpus (BNC), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and ChatGPT. It is important to note that consider and think over exhibit identical patterns only in the magazine genre and the miscellaneous genre of the BNC, whereas they share the same pattern only in the newspaper genre of the COCA. This can be taken as confirming evidence that in the BNC, think over and consider are 28.57% the same, whereas in the COCA, they are 14.28% the same. Simply put, think over and consider exhibit a low similarity in the BNC and the COCA. A further point to note is that consider is most similar to think over in the newspaper genre of the BNC, whereas the former is the closest to the latter in the TV/movie genre of the COCA. This, in turn, implies that in the newspaper genre of the BNC and the TV/movie genre of the COCA, think over and consider exhibit the highest degree of similarity. It is also worth noting that the standard deviation of think over and consider clearly shows American speakers’ preferences. Most importantly, 18 of 30 collocations of think over and consider are the same, which suggests that consider and think over share 60% of their collocations.