A Corpus-Based Study Of Semantic Prosody In English Majors' Chinese-English Translation Texts

One cannot deny the difficulties and emphasis placed on Chinese English learners regarding how to translate Chinese to English. One of the reasons why native English speakers are often confused by some'look-a-like'right English equivalent translated by Chinese learners is the disharmony of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody, an important subject in modern Corpus Linguistics, has drawn attention and has become a new and essential issue to the study of translation as the lexico-semantics since the 1990s.This corpus study adopts a combination of methodology used both the quantitative approach of Corpus Linguistics and the qualitative approach of contrastive analysis. The data for this research are drawn from Corpus for English Majors (CEM), the online Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Modern Chinese Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (CCL). Referring to the explanation of the synonyms and bilingual dictionaries and the significance of occurrence in the corpus, four groups of semantically-related items are selected for investigation. Through observing the frequency of occurrence, colligation, collocations, and concordance of them, the study aims to investigate semantic prosody information presented in the college students'translation corpus, contrast the semantic prosodic behaviors performing in the English learners'corpus with those in the native English speakers'corpus, and explore the differences and similarities in the collocates and semantic prosodies of the selected equivalent items from a cross-linguistic perspective. Furthermore we can explore the pedagogical and translational implication value for lexicography and vocabulary instruction.With observing the collocational behaviors of the four groups of semantically-related items, the major findings in this research are as follows:(1) In the first semantic set, both of the English synonymous pair FIND and DISCOVER in CEM show the mixed semantic prosody. FIND shows more apparent tendency to collocate with mixed evaluation. While contrasting with the real semantic prosody in COCA, the native-speaker corpus, Chinese students tend to collocate the unfavorable evaluative words within the left four spans, and consequently FIND tends to negative semantic prosody. Such condition has been reasoned to be influenced upon the negative transfer by Chinese, with a semantic prosodic investigation of FIND's Chinese equivalent发现.(2) The second semantic set CHANGE & TRANSFORM and the third semantic set KEEP & MAINTAIN also display the tendency of collocating with negative words and make the neutral semantic prosody more negative.(3) The fourth semantic set OFFER and PROVIDE are both imbued with stronger positive semantic features, the former one is more apparent. While compared with the collocational behavior presented in COCA, the native speakers'corpus, OFFER and PROVIDE both bear simpler collocational behavior. Otherwise, they show the same semantic prosodic features as in COCA.(4) After the investigation of the Chinese equivalent of the first group and the fourth group, the result shows the main reason that semantic prosody disharmony originates from the mother tongue, Chinese negative and positive language transfer.(5) By contrasting the four near-synonymous words in English in CEM and COCA, the study shows the synonymous words vary to a certain degree in their collocational behavior and semantic prosodic features though they share common characteristics.(6) By contrasting semantic prosody in the Chinese and its English equivalent, the study shows there are more gaps than overlaps between them.Since most of near-synonyms are only identical or similar in denotational meaning, their collocational behaviors and semantic prosodies are quite different. Semantic prosody of near-synonyms should be taken into consideration when we are translating equivalents into different languages. Based on the findings, the thesis proposes significant implications that the knowledge of semantic prosody can be very helpful in the teaching and learning of near- synonyms, dictionary compilation as well as in the equivalent translation of different languages.