| Semantic prosody describes the way in which a certain word habitually attracts a certain type of lexical items with similar semantic features and constitutes particular collocations. Its main function is to express the speaker or the author’s attitude towards pragmatic environment, usually appears as positive, negative and neutral. It is often hidden in between the lines and applied subconsciously. Therefore, a majority of non-native speakers neglect its existence, not mentioned to the differences of semantic prosody among different texts.The thesis attempts to find out the differences between semantic prosody of the reports on haze and smog in China at home and those abroad, its relevant re?sons and effects as well. Official websites of famous newspaper in the domestic and overseas are utilized to collect200pieces of news about haze and smog in China between March,2013and March,2014and build News Corpus for Native Speakers Text (NENT) and News Corpus for Chinese Text (CENT). China, will, smog, air and environmental were chosen as node words by virtue of BFSU PowerConc1.0and Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator. Then with the aid of corpus linguistics, the thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis of node words’ collocations, colligations and semantic prosody.The study comes to a tentative finding that the semantic prosody features of the five node words are different in two corpora. China, will and environmental bear negative prosody in NENT, while showing positive prosody in CENT. As for smog and air, negative prosody is dominant in NENT, while in CENT both negative and positive prosody are significant. Four reasons are given for the differences. Firstly, the broadsheets overseas and at home focus on different perspectives of the event. Then, some of the reports in NENT exaggerate the facts to some extent. Besides, different language habits may affect the semantic prosody. Finally, the different value and belief of the editors could be the reason. |
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