| This paper examines the semantic prosodies of words found in the news reportage about Beijing Olympics 2008 one week before its opening by using a self-built news reportage corpus including both newspaper reporting and TV broadcasting news texts. The applied key method in this analysis is corpus-based. Semantic prosody is a notion which means words associate with a certain group of other words- in another way, being named collocates. These words are themselves mutually related, often either in a negative or positive way, and sometimes belonging to a set with some specific meanings at the semantic level. Some linguists observed this language phenomenon and put forward the concept of semantic prosody as that, a certain word (node) has its own particular category of collocating words, which often conveys the attitudes and evaluations of the writers or speakers, often explained from a perspective of cognitive linguistics. However, many corpus linguists criticized this view of cognitive linguistics headed by Hoey and other linguists. This present study tries to find a bridge between corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics,using both the qualitative and quantitative methods in corpus linguistics to explain the concept from a perspective in cognitive linguistics, and it also researched the characteristics of semantic prosody of 38 selected nodes from three semantic groups in the news reportage corpus, which are as following:"actions when approaching the opening of Beijing Olympics"(including verbs: suspect, share, monitor, travel, last, watch, send, win, attack, access, view, rune),"focus towards the time before Beijing Olympics"( including nouns: Beijing, Olympics, Chinese, Tibet, Xinjiang, ceremony, athletes, London, China, pollution, stadium, August, sports, world ),"Beijing Olympics Descriptions"( including adjectives: special, foreign, dependant, more, political, international, China's, free, great, popular, best, western ). At last, five nodes of each semantic group are found with prevalent semantic characters and thus are analyzed in details. This paper thus shows how words in the news reportage environment about a certain topic interact with each other at a semantic level. After a brief introduction and literature review on collocation and semantic prosody, the main research based on an analysis of corpus data is presented. It shows that not only do words in the news reportage environment have semantic prosodies, which are that they are found to collocate with word groups that share semantic similarities in a regular way, but they also have their own unique semantic prosodies in this news reportage corpus about specific topic-Olympics. It was also noted, however, that these prosodies mostly carry strong tendencies as relations existing between different lexical items, rather than firmly fixed relationship. They are more of psychological choices at a paradigmatic level than only lexical collocates at a paradigmatic level in a specific register- here, it is news reportage about a certain topic. This study intends to contribute on the notion of semantic prosody. On the basis of the results of this present study, using the research methods in corpus linguistics, a cognitive model of semantic prosody is proposed. And two other models based on the results of this present study are also presumed and hypothesized; however, they need more evidence to support them. The present study ends by discussing its applications when the results are introduced into some linguistic fields such as the texts analysis, and critical discourse analysis. |
PDF Full Text Request