The Semantic Prosody Of English Psych-Verbs:a Corpus-Based Study

Psych-verbs, an important semantically-based subcategory of verbs, represent the state or change of human psychology. They are frequently used to describe complex psychological activities such as emotion, attitude, and willingness, etc., rooted in the human mind. Linguists and psycholinguists are particularly concerned with such verbs, for they play a crucial role in people’s daily life. However, most previous studies on the English psych-verbs were more rationalistically than empirically oriented, mainly from the cognitive, semantic or syntactic, etc., perspectives. Up to now, there have been few empirical researches about the English psych-verbs, still less from the perspective of semantic prosody based on corpus data, abroad or home.Therefore, it mainly addressed6psych-verbs (as node words), together with their noun collocates, namely, LIKE/DISLIKE, LOVE/HATE and APPRECIATE/RESENT, all belonging to the admire type. The research was based on a sub-corpus selected from the British National Corpus (BNC), including the written English components of "UK and Ireland" and "USA". The collocates within the span from the5th word on the left and the5th on the right of the node psych-verbs were extracted and analyzed, based on the colligation patterns of N+V and V+N. Along with this process were generalized the semantic prosodic features of the target English psych-verbs in collocation with nouns. The results showed that the subjects of the6psych-verbs in the left side are people, with slight differences. They differ primarily in their semantic prosodies arising from their noun collocates following them. LIKE tends to collocate with words concerning human living. DISLIKE mainly collocates with words designating people, human activities, and human senses. Both LIKE and DISLIKE are of the semantic prosody of describing people’ attitude to physical world or social world. LOVE has an apparent tendency to collocate with nouns referring to people, especially family members. HATE tends to collocate with words referring to people or people’s thinking. Both LOVE and HATE bear the semantic prosody of showing people’ psychological world or emotional world. APPRECIATE prefers abstract terms indicating spiritually uplifting things as collocates. RESENT more often collocates with words which can have a severe impact on human spirit. Both APPRECIATE and RESENT are imbued with the semantic prosody of expressing people’s spiritual world. For both the positive and negative psych-verbs, the intensity of feelings implied in their semantic prosodies varies from weak to strong.The results have much significance in several aspects. Theoretically, the findings have enriched the literature on English psych-verbs, highlighting the roles of collocation and semantic prosody in determining the semantics and usage of words. Methodologically, this research has demonstrated the possibility of using corpus-based research as an empirical approach to English psych-verbs, even words in general. Pedagogically, the results have shown the potential of corpora to be employed to enhance the teaching and learning of lexical semantics and usage.