The Study Of Semantic Prosody In The Military Power Of The People's Republic Of China Based On Corpus

In the recent years, as linguists both at home and abroad have done much research on corpus linguistics from many perspectives, great progress has been made. Semantic prosody is a new perspective of corpus linguistics study. The research of corpus shows that the collocation behaviors of words have some semantic tendency:"consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates"; when the usage of a word gives an impression of all attitudinal or pragmatic meaning, it is called a"semantic prosody". Colligation is another important concept in the research of collocation. Colligation is the relationship between one lexical item and a grammatical category. It is of great help in studying semantic prosody from the perspective of grammatical categories. The term was another term first put forward by Firth (1957). Colligation is the collocation that occurs in the grammatical frame. In recent years, with the research in depth on semantic prosody, its characteristics in the fields of language teaching, vocabulary learning, and study on news are explored. However, nearly no one has noticed its usage in the field of military. Meanwhile, the study of semantic prosody in military texts is far from enough.The full name of the report is Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People's Republic of China. Since 2000 (except 2001), the Department of Defense (DOD) has published 9 reports until 2009. In the Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2000,"Chinese Threat Opinion"was first raised by the United States. And the annual report put emphasis on the issue. The data source of MPPRC mostly comes from those public materials, including China's National Defense, experts'talks, military news, and so on. It seems of great authority and objective. However, in the reports, some words with negative semantic prosody are employed to transfer the unjust view on China's proper military progress and internal affair in an implicit way. This application misguides people who do not know the truth. This thesis is a study based on corpus. On the basis of Hoey's semantic prosody and textual colligation theories, the thesis aims to study the Military Power of the People's Republic of China from the perspective of semantic prosody. The thesis has collected the data of eight years'Military Power of the People's Republic of China from 2002 to 2009, totaling 166,975 words. With the help of Wordsmith 4.0 program, keywords of the military texts are examined by comparing with the wordlists of BNC. As the aim of the thesis is to explore the implicit intention of the United States'employment of the semantic prosody, as well as China and Taiwan are on the top of the 481 keywords, the study will focus on the collocates with high frequency in the neighborhood of these two words, such as emerge and against.The major findings of the study are as follows:(1) In The Military Power of the People's Republic of China, there are negative semantic prosodies employed by the United States, for example, against, emerge, etc(2) The application of semantic prosody does influence the recognition and view of the western world on China.(3) With the employment of semantic prosody, the United States vainly attempts to spread"China Threat Option"to break the regional balance.(4) The U.S. government vainly attempts to split Taiwan from China by using some semantic prosody.The significance of the study is that it provides a new perspective for semantic prosody research and enriches the research on semantic prosody. Meanwhile, the study is concentrated on the employment of semantic prosody in military texts. In this way, the theory of semantic prosody comes into practical use. Last but not least, the study will be of some assistance to our external claims to establish good international image.