A Contrastive Study Of Semantic Rhyme In English Verbs Based On Corpus - Based

Semantic prosody is an important research object in contemporary corpus linguistics. Based on CLEC and FLOB, this paper makes a contrastive analysis of do-type written English verbs which includes finish, complete, fulfill, perform, execute, accomplish and commit. Some indexes of do-type verbs in FLOB are too few, so British National Corpus is also used as a reference corpus.It is found that finish, complete have neutral semantic prosodies in CLEC and FLOB. However, commit displays an obviously negative semantic prosody in CLEC, FLOB and BNC. Compared with the neutral semantic prosodies of fulfill, accomplish and execute in FLOB and BNC, the semantic prosodies of fulfill, accomplish and execute couldn’t be concluded in CLEC, because their indexes are less than 50. Nevertheless, the typical noun collocations of fulfill and accomplish are similar to native English speakers’ by observing the indexes in CLEC. Moreover, compared with native English speakers, there exists prosodic clash when Chinese English learners use perform, and then the cause of prosodic clash is stated. This study aims to provide new methods and perspectives for lexical research, and to provide suggestions for the application of semantic prosody in English teaching and dictionary compilation.