A Contrastive Study Of The Semantic Prosody And Colligation In Two News Corpora

At the present time in China, news in English not only plays an important role in information transference to the outside world, but also becomes increasingly popular among Chinese readers, who use it primarily to improve their English. However, when reading these news stories, readers may feel that they are somewhat different from those written by natives for reasons they cannot tell. In order to explore the differences, the present study presents a comparison between two news corpora: Reuters and Chinadaily in terms of semantic prosody and colligation. The two concepts deal with meaning and grammar respectively but both associate with co-occurrence of words. FoxPro programs were used for the keywords concordance and Chi-square tests were applied to the processing of the data provided by the corpora. In addition to the comparison, a survey was carried out to see if semantic prosody and colligation information have been properly represented in contemporary English dictionaries.The study's major findings were (1) both semantic prosody and colligation play an important role in production of native-like language;(2) significant differences of semantic prosody exist in certain lexical items, primarily in their neutral and negative usage;(3) more noticeably, all the items observed demonstrate significant differences in all or most of their colligation patterns;(4) contemporary English dictionaries do not provide adequate information about semantic prosody and colligation, especially in those English-Chinese dictionaries being examined.Based on these findings, the thesis also provides implications about English vocabulary instruction, dictionary compilation, as well as the application of corpora to second language learning.