A Constrastive Study On The Semantic Prosody Between Chinese English Learners And Native English Speakers In Language Use

Semantic prosody, one of the most popular topics in modern corpus linguistics, generally refers to a common language phenomenon that the collocates of a word usually form a semantic class that can be characterized in terms of attitudinal meaning. It reveals the "collocation harmony", which is an essential principle in language use and expands the studies on vocabulary to a great extent.Semantic prosody has aroused strong interest in the academic circles since it was first noticed by Sinclair in 1991 and was first introduced to the public by Bill Louw in 1993. Many scholars at home and abroad have conducted researches on semantic prosody and have proposed a lot of constructive ideas in applying the theory to vocabulary learning. For example, Stubbs classified semantic prosody into three categories:positive, neutral and negative in 1996 (In this thesis, the author divides semantic prosody into positive, intricate and negative ones as "neutral" is a rather plausible word). In 2003, Pan Fang and Feng Yuejin discussed how to analyze collocations by quantitative and qualitative methods based on corpus study. By analyzing some examples of semantic prosody in language use, they believed that it will inspire and promote the development of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and translation theory.In order to apply the theory of semantic prosody to English vocabulary learning, especially English synonym learning, this thesis concentrates on a contrastive study of the semantic prosodies of ten words(accomplish, achieve, commit, complete, execute, finish, fulfill, organize, perform, undertake) in the semantic field of do mainly based on two online corpuses (The Chinese Learner's English Corpus and the Jiao Da English for Science and Technology)(the Corpus of Contemporary American English is also used in the thesis), and aims to answer the following three questions:a). What kinds of semantic prosody do the chosen words have?b). Do Chinese learners use these words correctly in terms of semantic prosody and what are the causes of the possible semantic prosody shock? c). Is there semantic prosody shock in language use by native speakers, and what are the possible reasons?Through research and analysis, the author of this thesis makes a conclusion that eight of the ten chosen words have an intricate semantic prosody without an obvious attitudinal tendency. However, commit displays a negative semantic prosody and it often co-occurs with unpleasant words like crime and suicide. Similarly, perform is often used together with unpleasant words according to the research results in this thesis.Secondly, English learners in China use most of the target words correctly in terms of semantic prosody. However, the author has found that there exists semantic prosody shock compared with native English expressions in English learners'use of achieve, fulfill and perform. The main cause of the shock may be due to the conventional way of learning English vocabulary that relies to a great extent on the definitions in English dictionaries which are sometimes confusing or even misleading.Thirdly, there is also semantic prosody shock in native speakers'language use according to the study of commit in the Corpus of Contemporary American English because native speakers sometimes manipulate the shock on purpose to convey certain implicature in a rhetorical manner. This finding is instructive in that it tells us that we should be careful when reading and translating English original literatures and we should also learn it by heart that language is flexible.The author hopes that the present study can make some contributions to the theory of semantic prosody and help people to better understand the theory, which is valuable in vocabulary learning. The originality of the thesis lies in that it makes a contrastive study of the ten English synonyms based on two online corpuses for the first time, which reveals several language facts and provides some suggestions for vocabulary learning. In the final part of the thesis, the author also points out the limitations of the present study and makes suggestions for further studies.