A Corpus-based Study On The Semantic Prosody Of Causative Verbs In Written English

Semantic prosody is an important subject in modern corpus linguistics. Previousstudies mainly focused on semantic prosodic behaviour of some common Englishverbs, nouns and adjectives. However, studies on the semantic prosody of causativeverbs are rare. Because causative verbs can be used to form perfomatives, a goodcommand of the semantic prosody of causative verbs is important for harmoniouscommunication. That is why this paper is conducted.This paper adopts an integrated method of quantitative and qualitative analysis toconduct a detailed analysis of collocational behaviors and collocates’ semantic featuresof three causative verbs (MAKE, KEEP, LET) on the basis of CLEC and NativeCorpus (including Brown, LOB, Frown, and FLOB) in order to answer the followingquestions:(1) What are the semantic prosodic differences and similarities betweenChinese EFL learners and native speakers?(2) What are the possible reasons for thesemantic prosodic differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers?(3)What possible implications can the present study provide for the English teaching andlearning in China?The research is conducted by four steps. Firstly, the three words are in turnconcordanced in CLEC and Native Corpus through AntConc, then non-causative usageconcordance lines are deleted. Secondly, clusters of causative verbs are extracted byAntConc Cluster in order to compare the differences and similarities of thecollocational behaviors of them in two corpora. Thirdly, the semantic prosodies of theconcordance lines of the three words are analyzed one by one, and the proportion ofeach kind of semantic prosody is calculated. Then the semantic prosodies of the threewords in each corpus are examined. Fourthly, SPSS is adopted to test whether thereexists any difference of the semantic prosodic feature of the selected words betweentwo corpora.Results show that Chinese learners do not gain a good command of the semantic prosodies of these three items. As far as MAKE is concerned, Chinese learners exhibitsimilar semantic prosody as compared with that of native speakers. The onlydifference between them is that Chinese learners underuse neutral semantic prosody.For KEEP, Chinese learners overuse positive semantic prosody and underuse neutralone. While for LET, Chinese learners overuse positive semantic prosody and underuseneutral one, but there is not any significant difference in negative prosody between thetwo groups. The main reasons for these differences include: language input, thetransfer of first language, etc.This research sheds some light on the foreign language teaching and learning.Firstly, it is advised that foreign language teachers should increase large amount ofknowledge of semantic prosody so that learners are able to gain due awareness ofsemantic prosody; secondly, teachers should move their focus from traditional modelof lexical teaching to the collocations of the lexical item which is closely related tosemantic prosody, which helps learners output language with appropriate semanticprosody; last but not the least, it is suggested that teachers should take full advantageof corpora and concordance to improve EFL teaching and learning. Learners candiscover the features of language on their own by observing considerable authenticlanguage materials, and the quality of interlanguage can also be improved.