A Corpus-Based Investigation On Semantic Prosody Of ’Turn’ Verbs

Since1960s, corpus linguistics gained progressive development under the influence of behaviorism. At the very beginning of its birth, it did not attract much attention since it went in the opposite direction to Chomsky’s theories, but with increasing acknowledgment by linguists, it has been adopted in different research areas, such as linguistic analysis, pedagogy, lexicography, and artificial intelligence, etc. As corpus linguistics develops, linguistics began to introduce some new concepts, and semantic prosody is one of them. Firstly brought up by Eric Louw, semantic prosody gets deeper investigations as the corpus is becoming much stronger. With the help of corpus, those linguists can put forward their own opinion, and verify them. This dissertation is going to analyze the semantic prosody of ’turn’ verbs-turn, run, get, go, grow, become as single verbs, and transform into, convert into, change to, morph into as phrasal verbs. After the analysis, we can summarize those statistics and extract some useful experiences to EFL. The research findings are:firstly, get, go, grow, run present the negative semantic prosody, and become tends to present more of the positive and negative semantic prosody, and turn presents the mixed semantic prosody. Transform into and convert into both display positive or neutral semantic prosody, instead of negative semantic prosody, and morph into, and change to display the mixed semantic prosody and neutral semantic prosody, respectively. Secondly, it is found that the semantic prosody of one specific verb form of some single verbs and phrasal verbs is not consistent to that of other forms. Such finding is obtained from checking up all the concordances of all verb forms. Thirdly, some verbs are frequently followed by some prepositions to stress the sense. Fourthly, after investigating the part of speech of those collocates, not all the part of speech of those collocates are the same. For example, run tends to collocate with adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions, while other single verbs mainly collocate with adjectives. And change to also collocates with verbs, while other phrases do not.