| Natural Semantic Metalanguage refers to the theory of language description originated by Anna Wierzbicka, who holds the view that every language has an irreducible "semantic core" which would be used in explaining all the complex expressions, analyzing cultural specific words and representing cultural scripts. The set of semantic primes is supposed to be a complete lexicon for semantic analysis. The non-arbitrary and irreducible semantic core must have a language-like structure, with a lexicon of indefinable expressions and a grammar. This theory has to be tested based on real language data.This thesis is a corpus-based study on English and Chinese semantic prime happen and fasheng in Natural Semantic Metalanguage. With the aids of computer software Wordsmith 5.0 and SPSS 10.0, this thesis conducts a Contrastive study on happen and fasheng based on a small English and Chinese comparable corpus constructed by ourselves. By extracting evidence from the corpus, the distribution of happen and fasheng, their syntactic patterns, their colligation types as well as their semantic prosody are identified and analyzed. We found that there is no significant difference between English semantic prime happen and its Chinese counterpart fasheng with respect to their distribution, their syntactic patterns, their colligations, and their semantic prosody. The results reveal that semantic prime happen is identical with its Chinese counterpart fasheng. Thus provides an evidence to justify the premise of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory.
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