A Corpus-Based Probe Into Semantic Development From Viewpoint Of Collocation

Collocation is becoming more and more important in applied linguistics. With the increasing development of the society, a number of new collocations come into being especially in economic and financial field for various needs, which sparks our keen interest to make a tentative exploration. The word, tsunami, as a loan word from Japanese, enters English vocabulary and is used more and more frequently, especially in the collocation form of the financial tsunami under current financial crisis. At the end of 2008, the collocate topped the list published by Global Language Monitor in its annual worldwide survey, what is more interesting is there is evidence showing that some collocates relevant to tsunami receive rave reviews, those phenomena deserve our close attention to do research on the semantic development from the angle of the collocation.The author collected ten years'publications of Economist, one English magazine to build corpus and to compare with results from search engine as GOOGLE and BAIDU. This study chose hurricane, earthquake, storm, volcano as another four natural disaster keywords with purpose of contrastive observation on collocational behavior, focusing on the major research question:"Why does the tsunami,a loanword from Japanese, become more and more popular under the current financial crisis"and intended to make a dynamic and diachronic analysis on collocation and semantic prosody to explore its semantic development and the motivation to semantic development.The study found that the word tsunami's collocation and semantic expansion with increasing frequency under the background of financial crisis are inextricably intertwined with tsunami's high frequency in recent years and individual cognition on tsunami. Collocation, as a mode of realization and creation of meaning, determines and depends on semantics and vice versa. Metaphorical thinking based on similarity, plays an important role in the process of collocation and semantic extension, which decides the direction of semantic development and is seen as the internal mechanism to semantic development and therefore causes the linguistic phenomenon that lexical co-occurrence is seen as coexistence of concepts,which shows that structural meaning of collocation is not abstract. To varying degrees, collocation meaning is coming from life experience that we go through in society and it is a product of concept metaphor in linguistic structure.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics and on the basis of corpus study, the present thesis investigated semantics and semantic prosody in order to give enlightenment to language study and language teaching and contribute to enhancing readers'collocation ability and strengthening their cognition of semantic prosody and metaphor. Furthermore, this thesis made a bold prediction of the possible semantic development about tsunami in collocation, which simply serves as a catalyst hoping to provide references for the lexicographists, language learners and teachers in the future.