A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study Of The Semantic Prosody Of High Frequency Words In Financial English And General English

This thesis aims to explore the semantic prosody of some high frequently used words in financial English and general English, as well as its implication on pedagogy and lexical study. Semantic prosody was first mentioned by Sinclair in1991. He found out that ’set in’ was habitually associated with unpleasant events, and enjoyed collocating with words with unpleasant connotation, such as ’rot, decay, and decadences’. Some linguists took the concept and proposed that a certain word has its own particular collocating category which often conveys a writer’s or speaker’s evaluating meaning, and any collocate beyond it may sound unnatural.With the development of international financial activities, financial English plays a more and more important role, especially for those non-English speakers. It is important for them to use financial English skillfully. A literature view provides very limited research results accounting for financial English. To understand and consider financial English from the perspective of semantic prosody has not been explored until now. Thus, it is the author’s intention to analyze the semantic prosody of some high frequently used words in financial English and general English to provide a different and efficient way to understand and use financial English for learners.This thesis is conducted by using a methodology that combines both the quantitative approach and the qualitative approach. First the author complied a financial English corpus, through which a word list with high frequency was generated. Second,4node words were chosen for further analysis in Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). These four words are firm, company, employee, and interest, among which, firm and company were analyzed within a group. The reason for this classification was based not only on their frequency but also on the following idea:firm and company are near synonyms; employee has single semantic meaning; interest has a diversified meaning, so as to make the analysis and result much more comprehensive and scientific.Analysis results are as follows:(1) In Financial English Firm is smaller and more specific than company while company enjoys a much more diversified semantic prosody than firm and it displays a positive semantic prosody compared with firm; As a noun form, Firm has different semantic prosody in Financial English and general English; as an adjective, the semantic prosody on the right side of firm is "attitude and time", and this kind semantic prosody is only found in general English; Semantic prosody of company in general English is also diversified as it is in financial English.(2) The main semantic prosody of employee is "rights and obligations". In financial English, personal value and contribution is highlighted while in general English, this semantic prosody is less emphasized."Every","each" and "per" are found to collocate with employee most frequently in financial English, which is not found in general English. One semantic prosody of employee is "company". It means the employee in the company. But the distribution of this semantic prosody is a little bitter different in financial English and general English.(3) There are three connotations of interest both in financial English and general English and the distribution of the three connotation of interest is quite different in financial English and general English according to the statistical results in COCA. But the semantic prosodies of interest found in these two different genres are the same.From the analysis of the semantic prosody of those node words, we can come to the conclusion that semantic prosody of words in actual language use are very complicated, which can not be summarized by a few regular patterns. More importantly, we can not predict the general semantic prosody of words used in some certain genre, only by analyzing a few words in this genre. The aim and significance of this thesis is to help learners to realize the importance of semantic prosody of words by providing an approach to semantic prosody analysis, to make a better understanding of words in language use.