A Contrastive Study On The Semantic Prosody Of HAPPEN

This thesis is a corpus-driven study on the semantic prosody of HAPPEN by Chinese learners through comparison of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB), the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC). With a series of computation and tests carried out with WordSmith 4.0 and SPSS, this thesis examines the overall distributions and the frequencies of HAPPEN with positive, negative, and neutral prosodies. The results reveal the prevalent usage and misuses of the semantic. prosodies of HAPPEN in Chinese learners' compositions. Based on the findings of the research, some pedagogical suggestions are proposed.