A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of English Synonymous Verbs From The Perspective Of Semantic Prosody

In the process of communication and writing,proper use of words can make the expression more effective and coherent,and accurately convey the user’s attitudes and feelings.Similar words have similar meanings,but they are different in terms of collocations and emotional colors.These synonyms have caused confusion and learning obstacles for Chinese English learners.While the traditional vocabulary discrimination is conducted by looking up the dictionary or relying on language perception and other introspective methods,it cannot accurately and objectively reflect the differences between synonyms.With the rise of corpus linguistics,researchers can extract a great number of real and natural text data from the corpus,and then use retrieval and statistical software to analyze the characteristics and differences of vocabulary usage objectively.This thesis uses the method of contrastive interlanguage analysis(CIA),taking the British Academic Written English Corpus(BAWE)as the reference corpus,and the Chinese English learner corpus(iWrite Baby)as the observation corpus.The synonymous verbs INFLUENCE,AFFECT and IMPACT,which mean 影响 in Chinese,will be analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively,aiming at exploring the following two questions:(1)When these three synonymous verbs INFLUENCE,AFFECT and IMPACT are used by native English speakers,what are their semantic prosody characteristics?(2)What are the differences in the use of these three synonymous verbs by Chinese English learners and native speakers?The research findings are as follows:(1)Native speakers use AFFECT most frequently.It often appears in economic,environmental,medical and healthcare contexts.Moreover,AFFECT is more formal than the other two node words.AFFECT puts more emphasis on the action or state itself,and is more directly affected by external factors,while INFLUENCE implies a gradual process.In addition,INFLUNCE is often used to express changes in people’s thoughts,spirits,and behaviors.IMPACT can be interchanged with AFFECT in certain business contexts.And these three synonymous verbs all present mixed semantic prosody and strong tone in BAWE,and the tone of IMPACT is particularly strong.(2)When Chinese English learners use these three synonymous verbs,they have both similarities and differences with native English speakers.The frequency,context,and implication of INFLUENCE,as well as the semantic prosody of AFFECT expressed by Chinese English learners are similar to those of native speakers.The differences lie in five aspects.First,Chinese learners underuse the positive semantic prosody of INFLUENCE and the negative semantic prosody of IMPACT.Second,in the use of these three synonyms,Chinese English learners have a tougher tone than native speakers,especially in the use of IMPACT.Third,Chinese English learners have a poor grasp of the implications of AFFECT,and they often mix the words AFFECT and INFLUENCE together.Fourth,Chinese English learners are weaker in collocation ability of these three words than native speakers.The collocation words are not rich enough and they are mostly simple words.Furthermore,there are many unidiomatic collocations in iWrite Baby.Fifth,Chinese English learners like to use the structure of SVO directly,and they are not good at adding modifiers to node words,especially adverbs of manner.Based on the corpus data and the analysis of this research,the author puts forward some suggestions on English teaching in middle schools from three aspects: teaching material compilation,teaching and learning.First,when compiling teaching materials,editors should make full use of corpora and analytical tools,and add columns for synonyms discrimination.Second,corpus-based teaching method and English-Chinese contrastive analysis method can be used in English teaching.Third,students can use corpus and other tools to practice vocabulary and writing,and to improve their independent learning ability.