On Sure to and Bound to: A Corpora-based Analysis

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that sure to and bound to are low similarity synonyms. With respect to the Movie Corpus, it is significant to note that bound to may have been preferable to sure to except the 2000s and the 2010s. A major point to note is that the frequency of sure to and bound to reached a peak (688 tokens vs. 442 tokens) in the 2010s. With respect to the BNC, it is worth pointing out that sure to and bound to show the same property in the spoken genre, whereas they show a different property in the other six genres. It can thus be inferred that in the seven genres of the BNC, sure to is 14.28% the same as bound to. The BNC clearly shows that sure to get (25 tokens) and bound to say (42 tokens) are the most preferable ones for the British. The BNC further shows that 35% of forty verbs are the collocations of sure to and bound to. It is thus reasonable to assume that sure to and bound to are low similarity synonyms.

Keywords: Movie Corpus, British National Corpus, type, token, sure to, bound to