A Comparative Corpus-based Study Of Semantic Prosody Of Cause, Career, And Effect In English Speakers’ And Chinese Learners’ English Writings

This dissertation reports a study that explore the semantic prosodic features ofthree node words: cause, career, and effect in the English writings of ChineseEnglish learners. This study combines qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis.The data of the study was obtained from the Chinese Learners Corpus (CLEC)and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). After the three nodeswere concordanced by Antconc in CLEC and COCA, all the collocations of eachnode word were extracted and calculated in terms of the Z-score and MI value forthe extracted collocations of each node word. Based on the identifications of thesemantic prosodic features of the collocations, the similarities and differencesbetween Chinese English learners and native speakers were compared.This study finds that not only similarities, but also differences exist in the use ofcollocations and the semantic prosody in English writings between Chinese learnersand native speakers. Sometimes the semantic prosody of English writings by Englishlearners is similar to that of native English speakers. But in most cases, the semanticprosody of the Chinese learners’ English writings is different from that of nativespeakers at pragmatic level. For example, the node word cause have nineteensignificant collocates in COCA, among them sixteen (84.21%) fall into the negativecategory, two (10.53%) fall into the neutral category, and only one (5.26%) falls intothe positive category. While the node word cause in CLEC have twenty-threesignificant collocates, eighteen (78.26%) fall into the negative category, three(13.04%) fall into the neutral category, and two (8.70%) fall into the positivecategory. In addition, considering the order of the collocates in CLEC, the Z-score ofchangs ranking first comes up to31.01347, which is totally different from that inCOCA. Because the headmost typical significant collocates in COCA almost belongto the negative category. It means that the habitual collocation of CAUSE in CLECis similar to that in COCA but the two are not identical versions. Besides, in ChineseEnglish learners’ writings, there are a number of interlanguage collocations andabnormal collocations, which leads to semantic conflict and disharmonious semanticprosody.Based on the findings, this study also explores the reasons for the interlanguagecollocations and abnormal collocations in Chinese English writings from two perspectives: one is the interference of mother tongue, and the other is concerningwith communication strategy. In addition, based on the causes explored, the studyputs forward some implications and suggestions for English teaching and learning.