A Comparative Study Of Semantic Prosodies Of Near Synonyms Provide And Supply

In recent years, semantic prosody has become an important research objects in Corpus Linguistics. Semantic prosody is a special collocational phenomenon, which refers to a kind of specific semantic feature that is formed when some words appear together habitually with some linguistic units with identical semantic feature. Semantic prosody generally can be classified as three kinds: positive semantic prosody, negative semantic prosody and neutral semantic prosody. This study aims to first summarize the characteristics of significant collocates of near-synonyms PROVIDE and SUPPLY in BNC and CLEC, and then by analyzing the characteristics of significant collocates of these two near synonyms and combining the classification of semantic prosody to summarize the semantic prosodies of these two near synonyms. At last, compare the similarities and differences of characteristics of significant collocates of these two near synonyms and their semantic prosodies.This study adopts the data-driven approach. Firstly, concordance lines of these two lexical items are respectively listed by using the research instrument AntConc 3.2.1w in BNC and CLEC these two corpora. It is the instrument BFSU Collocator 1.0 that is used to calculate MI-score and Z-score. And then, according to MI-score of 3 or higher or Z-score of 2 or higher, it is the significant collocates of these two lexical items that can be found. After the observation and analysis, the features of significant collocates and semantic prosodies of these two lexical items can be summarized. Finally, compare the similarities and differences of significant collocates and semantic prosodies of PROVIDE and SUPPLY used by English native speakers and Chinese English learners.The results of this study show that, firstly, as for the significant collocates, the significant collocates of nouns of lexical items-PROVIDE and SUPPLY have great proportion in these chosen nouns, adjectives and adverbs. The significant collocates of adjectives are the least collocates of all. The differences are that the significant collocates of these two lexical items used as subjects are different from the significant collocates used as objects. Significant collocates of nouns of PROVIDE in two corpora are mostly positive, and significant collocates of nouns of SUPPLY in two corpora are mostly neutral. Then, in terms of semantic prosody, PROVIDE and SUPPLY mainly carry positive and neutral semantic prosody in both BNC and CLEC, indicating that near synonyms have different semantic prosodies. But compared with English native speakers, Chinese English learners overuse the positive significant collocates, underuse the neutral significant collocates and misuse the negative significant collocates. They overuse the positive and neutral significant collocates of SUPPLY, but the negative significant collocates of it is unused. All of these indicate that Chinese learners haven't command the appropriate usage of negative semantic prosodies of these two lexical items. There still exist differences in using the positive and neutral semantic prosody between English native speakers and Chinese English learners.The major implications can be concluded by the above research results. Firstly, in teaching, teachers should make students aware of semantic prosody, and then give students guidance of using the way of differentiating near synonyms by observing their semantic prosodies. Secondly, under the guidance of teachers, students acquire the knowledge of semantic prosody to use the semantic prosodies of lexical items accurately.