Semantic Prosody In College English Writing: Problems And Possible Solutions

The EXPO 2010 is closed successfully, English, the global language of this century, is still enthusiastically hailed as a paramount communicative medium in China. Chinese from almost all strata rush to learn English either to ensure a better career prospect or to get deeper insights into this "English is everywhere" world. Pragmatic failure may arise even when the commonest words in English are used by Chinese EFL learners. Such inaptness gives the interlanguage an inexplicable trace of alien flavor. Thus educators should pay more attention to the subtle relationship of words and grammar. The term semantic prosody is raised to bridge the seemingly independent lexis and grammar. Therefore it is necessary to study the semantic prosody problems in college English writings and propose some pedagogical solutions for Chinese EFL teachers and learners.This dissertation is based on the corpus-driven approach combining the contrastive analysis (CA) and the contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) to examine the use of the node words selected from the British National Corpus (BNC) in college English writing samples (CEWS). In addition, the author makes a comparative study on those node words in terms of their semantic prosody with the intention of bringing out the problems of semantic prosody and proposing some pedagogical solutions for EFL teaching. To be specific, firstly eight node words are selected from BNC including four high-frequency verbs (LEAD TO, HAPPEN, CAUSE and PROVIDE) and four adjective amplifiers (VERY MUCH, TOTALLY, GREATLY, and TERRIBLY). Secondly, the author collects 3784 college English writing samples in Tonghua Teachers College at random for this empirical study, including 1956 freshmen's writing samples and 1828 sophomores'writing samples and extracts the collocates of the node words both in BNC and in CEWS through the Wordsmith Tools. Third, the numbers of each node word in three kinds of semantic prosody (positive, negative and neutral) are shown in tables through SPSS 13.0 and the Chi-square test. Fourth, the author makes a brief analysis of results on each node word and points out the semantic prosody problems in college English writing samples. The results show that the semantic behavior of the node words in CEWS is mostly similar to the native speakers. However, there still have some divergences in lexical collocational behavior and misuses of the node words in semantic prosody. On the basis of the present research, Chinese learners tend to have the similar semantic prosody when they use the node words PROVIDE and GREATLY, while LEAD TO, HAPPEN, CAUSE, VERY MUCH, TOTALLY and TERRIBLY are all shown different semantic prosody comparing with the native speakers. To be specific, native speakers employs LEAD TO with mixed semantic prosody, while Chinese learners use it with more than 70% negative semantic prosody. Native speakers use HAPPEN with seemingly negative semantic prosody, while the Chinese college students use it with neutral collocates in most cases. As for CAUSE, Chinese learners keep the similar semantic preference with native speakers, while one point should be figured out, native speakers never employ it with positive collocates while in CEWS the positive proportion even occupies 37.2%. TOTALLY and TERRIBLY are misused sometimes. For instance, the negative prosodies of TERRIBLY are rather overused while the positive semantic-prosodies are underused. At last, according to the conclusion of the comparative study, the author proposes some pedagogical solutions for Chinese EFL teaching to solve those semantic prosody problems. The detailed solutions are as follows:Firstly, teachers should teach collocations to minimize L1 influence through enlarging the input of native speakers'spoken and written materials then make a contrastive study between Chinese and English; secondly, teachers may adopt integrated approaches to teach collocations and semantic prosody; thirdly, teachers can apply data-driven learning in classroom teaching; fourthly, corpus can be introduced into EFL teaching and learning, so that the real corpus input can be enlarged. At the same time, we should build our own corpus of learners for investigation and analysis on semantic features of language users. Moreover, in order to develop learners'awareness of English semantic prosody, we should add the semantic prosody and the typical collocations of a lexical item while dictionary compilation and vocabulary syllabus making.