A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Semantic Prosody Of Adjectives Between Native Speakers And English Learners

The present comparative study aims to explore the semantic prosodic features and their pedagogical implications of high-frequency adjectives used by Chinese learners. It is conducted with the methodology combining the quantitative approach of Corpus Linguistics and the qualitative approach of contrastive analysis. The data for this study are drawn from corpora BNC (British National Corpus) and SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners). On the basis of their meanings given by dictionary and the significance of occurrence in corpora, three adjectives are chosen randomly from the top 50 high frequency adjectives in BNC for investigating in terms of collocational behavior and semantic prosody, they are full, real and physical. We closely observe their frequency, collocations and concordances, and based on the semantic fields of their recurrent collocates, the semantic preference and semantic prosody of the node words are identified, thus we compare and contrast the findings between native English and learner English.The general tendencies revealed in the present study include: 1) It is not a single word but a semantic preference that can form a certain semantic prosody. 2) The node words usually show mixed and complicated prosodic features, so the analysis of semantic prosody should be conducted in reference to semantic preference.3) In the two corpora, the node words show differences and similarities in terms of collocational behavior and semantic prosody to varying degrees. 4) The semantic prosody of the adjectives in native English is much clearer and stronger than that in learner English. 5) There are more gaps than overlaps in collocates in a certain semantic field between native and learner English.