Compare Struggle with Fight
Korean learners often find difficulty in Vocabulary when they study English. This is because there are too many words to know and it is hard to use them in the right context. The case, English expressions struggle and fight, can be a one of the examples. As for the range, this is a first difference between the two: struggle is only used for abstract events, whereas fight can be used with specific things. The difference between the two expressions is not only in range, but also in usage. In order to find out the difference in usage between the two expressions, I investigated 100 KWIC concordance lines from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008-). This technique reveals typical phrases in which the expressions struggle and fight usually occur.
The chart in the site shows that struggle is more often used in formal situations; academic, news, or magazine. This is usually related to the politics, period, or something else. The most common phrase including struggle was (24 tokens) “struggle to/for [do something].” Similarly, 8 tokens of struggle show in the phrase “struggle with [something].” These examples are used with the words which mean politics such as democracy, anti-colonial. These words are generally used in formal situations. In contrast, fight is seldom followed by nouns or pronouns that mean events or performs. In the sample concordance lines, most sample concordance lines show that fight is used in informal situations.
The concordance lines show that fight is more frequently used in informal situations as a spoken expression. This word can be used to express specific events or other things; weakness, infection, or sports(boxing). Most example concordance lines appears in the form “[prep] fight to” when fight is used as a verb, or this is used as noun alone.
Both expressions mean ‘trying to do against something.’ Struggle often appeared in formal situation such as “democracy,” but both expressions are used in against situation to reverse the surrounding.
The corpus study indicated several differences in usage between struggle and fight. I expect that learning these typical patterns will help Korean learners use struggle and fight more naturally.
Reference:
Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.