A Corpus-based Study On The Semantic Prosody Of Verbs Of Continuing Existence

The study of semantic prosody is quite a new area in linguistic field. Not until the1990s did linguists notice the phenomenon of semantic prosody, the associative meaning of a word resulting from its collocates. From then on, semantic prosody has become one of the focuses in corpus linguistics and has attracted much attention from corpus linguists. It can also be applied in dictionary compiling, translation and language teaching. Better understanding of semantic prosody not only benefits dictionary making and translation, but also benefits individual language learners and users for using language appropriately and naturally.To explore the semantic prosody of a particular word, it is indispensable to employ corpora and corpus-based approach to get authentic texts containing the word in natural uses. In this way, evidence and statistics can be obtained and used to prove that a particular word has its own semantic prosody, whether positive, negative, neutral or special.In this paper, a group of English verbs is selected as the object of study to explore their semantic prosodies. These verbs have the similar meaning of’continue to exist’, and are called’verbs of continuing existence’. However, their semantic prosodies are not clearly labeled in dictionary, or obvious enough to be easily noticed, causing confusion for language learners and users when they are making a choice among them. Therefore, each of these verbs is analyzed individually through corpus-based approach to reveal its semantic prosody.