Theoretical Exploration Of The Modern Chinese Semantic Prosody And Acquisition

The concept of semantic prosody originated from the study of corpus linguistics. John Sinclair is quite experienced in the area of corpus linguistics and dictionary compilation. While he was in charge of the construction of Collins Birmingham University International Language Database, John Sinclair noticed the phenomenon of semantic prosody. For example, the subjects of set in are usually unpleasant. Within the framework of the studies on semantic prosody aboard, this paper will research the characteristics and regularities of semantic prosody in modern Chinese and study the acquisition of Putonghua's semantic prosody by foreign students. This paper will focus on the study of standard modern Chinese, namely Putonghua. The major contents of this paper are as follows.Opening chapter is an introduction of the reason why this topic was chosen and research contents and methods.The first chapter summarizes the relevant researches done by both foreign and domestic scholars. Firstly, the studies of semantic prosody aboard are reviewed, which includes the definition, classification, function, significance, theory construction and applied research of semantic prosody. Secondly, the relevant studies within China are combed through. There was a long-term concern for the commendatory or derogatory traits of Chinese words, but nearly all the existing researches took the angle of lexis-semantic analysis. Corpus-based researches, which study words or other linguistic units from the angle of pragmatics, are at the primary stage.The second chapter is the definition and classification of Putonghua's semantic prosody. Putonghua's semantic prosody refers to the common pragmatic traits of those collocations which tend to co-occur with a key word or chunk repeatedly in various contexts and the key word or chunk is gradually affected by the common pragmatic traits and thus colored with certain emotional trends. The classification of Putonghua's semantic prosody follows the traditional way, namely negative, neutral and positive prosody. The criterion for classification, namely the characteristics of evaluation, is further analyzed according to three aspects, namely feeling/emotion, reason/cognition and biological/social needs.The third chapter is the characteristics and function of Putonghua's semantic prosody. There are three basic traits in Putonghua's semantic prosody, namely evasiveness, inter-collocation, continuum and flexibility of its strength. The change of word class of the same word may lead to the change in semantic prosody and some sentence patterns may hide certain semantic prosody, all of which means that Putonghua's semantic prosody bears certain relation to grammar. The pragmatic function of Putonghua's semantic prosody is subdivided into four, namely persuasiveness, humor, irony and implicit criticism. Putonghua's semantic prosody is conducive to textual cohesion, which is exemplified by the careful choices of words whose semantic prosody should be in line with the author's attitudes and the fact that semantic prosody flows in certain direction.Chapter four studies the acquisition of Putonghua's semantic prosody from various angles. Firstly, the questionnaire investigation shows that there is marked gap between foreign students and Chinese native speakers in terms of feeling of language, even advanced Chinese learners being no exception. Secondly, based on the data from both the inter-language corpus and native Chinese corpus, the differences of using the word "te51se51" between foreign students and Chinese native speakers are analyzed by the method of CIA. The differences include the richness of collocates, the span of the colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody. Thirdly, the errors of Putonghua's semantic prosody in 80 compositions written by foreign students are classified. Finally, the reasons of the errors are analyzed.Chapter five is the exploration of the teaching of Putonghua's semantic prosody. It's quite necessary to make use of corpus in the classroom teaching of Putonghua's semantic prosody. In this way, we could help foreign students to build up awareness of Putonghua's semantic prosody and improve their feeling of Chinese language. Based on the theory of language awareness, a classroom teaching mode of Putonghua's semantic prosody is made, which includes the following procedures:(1) inspire the need for corpus study; (2) present the concordance lines;(3) analyze the concordance lines;(4) search for more examples; (5) expansion and consolidation. Taking the text Yang35 Xiao51 Xing55 Da51 Shan55 as an example, this paper shows how to put the conceived mode into practice.Chapter six summarizes the research goal, the significance, the characteristics, innovative points and the conclusion of this paper.This paper is beneficial to the further exploration of theories of Putonghua's semantic prosody. It also provides a new angle for the study of Chinese dictionary compilation, Chinese translation, Chinese lexis, Chinese literature criticism, the atomization of Chinese information, and the acquisition of Chinese as a second language in particular.