A Corpus-based Study On The Collocation, Colligation, And Semantic Prosody Of Spend, Take, Pay, And Cost

There are a huge number of verbs in English. Some verbs share the similar meanings.Due to the appearance of these kinds of verbs, many people, especially the English L2learners make mistakes when they write articles. Therefore, the study of the verbs thatshare the similar meaning is not only necessary but also very helpful. The traditionalEnglish teaching mainly carries out analysis from the aspects of vocabulary, usage, andphrases. Due to the neglect of collocation, colligation, and semantic prosody, althoughstudents remember many word rules, they still make mistakes when using verbs. The studyof the verb collocation, colligation, and semantic prosody attaches great importance to theEnglish learning. Based on the data collected from CLEC and BNC, the thesis studies thecollocation, colligation, semantic prosody of Take, Spend, Pay, and Cost and draws aconclusion from the authentic data to gain suggestions for English teaching and learning.The thesis takes three steps. The study retrieves the items of Take, Spend, Pay and Cost byusing the online concordance and collects the concordance lines of Take, Spend, Pay, andCost, then the collocates of Take, Spend, Pay and Cost are extracted and analyzed inCLEC and BNC. In the end of the study, the author summarizes the collocation,colligation, and semantic prosodic features of Take, Spend, Pay, and Cost.The study reveals that from the perspective of collocation, there is a great discrepancybetween different levels of English L2 learners (ST2, ST3, ST4, ST5, and ST6) and thenative speakers. The higher levels of English L2 learners overuse some comparativelysimple collocation and colligation. Thus, they ignore the more rich forms and meanings ofthe collocation and colligation. From the perspective of semantic prosody, results indicatethat there are differences as well as similarities between English writings by nativespeakers and English L2 learners in terms of semantic prosody. In some cases, Englishwritings of English learners exhibit similar semantic prosody as compared with those of native speakers, but differences also exist. The positive semantic prosody and negativesemantic prosody of Spend, Take, Pay, and Cost in CLEC is less used compared with thatin BNC.Based on these findings, the thesis can provide significant implications for Englishteaching and learning. It is suggested that the knowledge of collocation, colligation, andsemantic prosody should be imparted to students. Students should be exposed to authenticdata, so that they are able to gain more awareness of collocation, colligation, and semanticprosody.