A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study Of Semantic Prosody Of English Near-Synonyms

Semantic prosody is the fruit of the development of corpus linguistics in recentyears and a fresh aspect of studying lexical behavior; the distinction of near-synonymsis the focus and difficulty in language teaching and learning. This paper explores thesemantic prosody of two groups of near synonyms: adjective pair large and great; andnoun pair effect, impact and influence. Based on CLEC and COCA, this paper aims toinvestigate the semantic prosodic features of the near-synonyms used by Chinese EFLlearners and native speakers and then concludes their similarities and differences.The present research consists of three procedures. Firstly, the node words aresearched by AntConc to extract their concordance lines. Then, extract all the collocatesand calculate MI score to indentify the significant collocates. And when the MI score isabove3.0, the collocates are considered as significant. Lastly, the semantic prosodyfeatures are concluded on the analysis of significant collocates of each node word. Andthe data from the two corpora are compared to work out the similarities and differencesbetween Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.It is found that Chinese EFL learners exhibit different semantic prosodic featuresas well as similarities compared with native speakers. For instance, Chinese EFLlearners are aware of the neutral semantic prosodic features of large collocated withadverbs, but display no positive or negative semantic prosodic features of adverbcollocates; they tend to express impact in negative contexts. Moreover, data alsoindicates that Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse one colligation while neglect othercolligations and they prefer to repeatedly employ some general and simple words oreven use some unnatural expressions. Therefore, it can be concluded that Chinese EFLlearners do not grasp the knowledge of semantic prosody well and they misuse somewords in terms of semantic prosody. In addition, factors affecting learners’ misuse ofsemantic prosody are sketched: first one is lack of typicality in teaching; another one isthe native language interference which appears to be the main reason; the last factor isthe difference in culture. Finally, it is suggested that in vocabulary teaching, teachersshould emphasize the knowledge of semantic prosody, and introduce corpus retrieveappropriately to it in order to help learners acquire the word knowledge about whatwords and what semantic associations it constantly co-occurs.