Semantic-prosodic Analysis Of English Directional Metaphor Verbs:a Multimodal Perspective

Traditionally,semantic prosody refers to the positive or negative meaning associations of a certain word with its collocates.For example,“set in” has a negative semantic prosody because it is often collocated with something unpleasant(say,fear or disappointment)as the subject of the verb.Most previous studies about semantic prosody tend to describe the emotional semantic preference and register preference of lexical items only,aiming to decode the emotional meaning of a word in a specific context.Furthermore,like the distributional semantics of computational linguistics,these studies mostly address semantic prosody with a data-driven approach,which concerns more about the identification of the collocational behaviour of a lexical item but fails to explain why the lexical item shows such a collocational behavior.The present study,based on Liang’s(2013a)multimodal semantics,purports to associate the semantic prosody of English directional metaphor verbs,EDMVs for short,with the multimodal perspective and develops an analytical framework of multimodal semantic prosody,which argues that multimodality helps to elaborate the in-depth semantic knowledge of EDMVs in a meaningful way and consequently motivate the semantic-prosodic patterns of such words.Specifically,this study aims to answer three research questions:(1)Do EDMVs exhibit any semantic-prosodic pattern in their collocational behavior? If so,what are they?(2)Why do we need a multimodal perspective to explicate the meaning and collocation of words in general,and those of EDMVs in particular?(3)What are the advantages of the multimodal semantic-prosodic account over the traditional semantic-prosodic theory in explaining the meaning of EDMVs? In addressing such questions,this study has mined some typical EDMVs from the British National Corpus(BNC)and the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)as the research objects.Based on multimodal semantics,it intends to conduct a qualitative analysis on the multimodal similarities and differences of EDMVs in terms of representation patterns and collocational patterns,and further to probe why different EDMVs present different collocational behaviors from the multimodal semantic-prosodic perspective with the help of a corpus-driven analysis.The study reveals that(1)the comprehension of an EDMV cannot be achieved in isolation,which is inevitably influenced by its habitual collocational behavior;(2)As the corpus analysis unveils,most popular collocates of an English directional verb present a specific semantic-prosodic pattern,constituting its semantic prosody;(3)Such semantic prosody shares a similar representation in the multimodal perspective,which not only facilitates the hearer to distinguish the distinctive motion manners of directional verbs and further constitute an in-depth comprehension of their metaphorical usages,but also powerfully explains why the word frequently co-occurs with some but not other collocates.In other words,multimodality serves as a motivational complement to the corpus-based study on semantic prosody.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One serves as an overall introduction.Chapter Two reviews the previous studies on directional verbs,semantic prosody,as well as multimodality.Based on multimodal semantics,Chapter Three formulates the analytic framework of multimodal semantic prosody.Chapter Four elaborates how multimodality helps to explicate the meaning of English directional metaphor verbs in depth.Chapter Five conducts a detailed study on English directional metaphor verbs from the multimodal semantic-prosodic perspective with the help of a corpus analysis,which explains why the multimodal semantic-prosodic account serves as a motivational complement to the traditional semantic-prosodic research.Finally,a conclusion will be reached in Chapter Six to sum up findings,implications and limitations of the current research.