A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Semantic Prosody

Semantic prosody is a special language phenomenon and the achievements ofcorpus linguistics of recent years. It is firstly proposed by Sinclair in1991referringto the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates.Semantic prosody is the semantic selectional preference of mutual attraction,expectancy and anticipation. Within the framework of semantic prosody, this thesisis designed to make a contrastive study of semantic prosody between China learnersand native speakers, taking two semantic sets as examples, which enjoy universalityand high frequency in all languages. Based on a great quantity of data from BNC andCLEC, this study focuses on the semantic prosodic features of five node words, andthe exploration of the factors leading to the similarities and differences of nativespeakers and China EFL learners.The findings show that the two semantic sets bear similarities in denotativemeaning but hold differences in semantic prosody. Additionally, Chinese EFLlearners share some commonness and hold disparities at the same time in masteringsemantic prosody. Since the study of semantic prosody at home and abroad is still atthe initial stage, the immaturity can be reflected in the comparative study of nativespeakers and China EFL learners, especially, the part of the exploration of synonymsis smaller.This research enjoys theoretical as well as pedagogical significance. In theory,with reference to the classification of semantic prosody, this paper proposes that itis necessary to further divide mixed semantic prosody into wholly mixed semanticprosody, positive-neutral, positive-negative and neutral–negative prosody.Pedagogically, this study will propose some practical implications which possiblyfacilitate English teaching, enhance students’ awareness of semantic prosody andimprove their communicative competence. Learners’ compilation supplemented withinformation of semantic prosody may better learner’s understanding of words.