A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Collocation And Semantic Prosodies Of The Synonyms Complete Entire Total Whole Between Learners Of English And Native Speakers Of English

The term semantic prosody was first used in print by Louw who defined it as "the consistent aura of meaning with which a lexical item is imbued by its collocates.’(Louw,1993:156-159).It is widely accepted that semantic prosody is divided into positive, negative and neutral set of meanings.Ever since the theory of semantic prosody was introduced to China nearly a decade ago, it has also aroused great academic interest among Chinese linguists and researchers. However, those studies at home mainly focus either on frequently-occurring verbs or on verb synonyms whereas very few has ever concerned with synonymous adjectives across corpus although adjectives are definitely one of the major word classes in English.The dissertation chooses the four synonyms complete, entire, total and whole based on Wordnet established by Princeton University, and the two corpora chosen for extracts are The Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), The dissertation intends to explore the striking differences as well as similarities in the semantic prosodies of these synonyms between Chinese English learners and native speakers of English.The findings show that, in general, Chinese students underuse all the four synonyms very much both in the number and the types of collocates.As far as semantic prosody is concerned, Chinese students are not clear about what words bearing negative meanings can co-occur with complete. For entire, despite the difference in occurrence and in the number of significant collocates, the semantic prosodies in both corpora are much the same. For total, Chinese students also underuse them in relation with words bearing negative and neutral meanings. This indicates that Chinese EFL learners do not have a full understanding of the semantic prosodies of total.With regard to whole, there are more of its identified concordance lines in both corpora than those of the other three node words. However, the difference lies in the fact that the number of the significant collocates of whole in COCA is smallest, compared to the other three in COCA while the one in CLEC is the largest; apart from that, Chinese learners tend to use it with many words in the situations where the native prefer to use entire, showing their deficiency in exactness of collocation. Both Chinese learners and the native take the neutral semantic prosody only.The findings of the study are hoped to present useful implications for EFL teaching and learning. When learning a new word, students should be fully exposed to the knowledge of semantic prosody so as to enhance their awareness. The introduction of semantic prosody features in vocabulary teaching definitely helps students to distinguish synonyms having subtle differences.