| Synonyms account for an important part in English vocabulary, and synonym discrimination has always been the difficult and essential part of English vocabulary acquisition. As a new perspective of lexicology research, semantic prosody is a scientific and effective method to discriminate synonyms. Semantic prosody is a special language phenomenon of the items chronically co-occurring with the node words all the time, the node words will inevitably be endowed with the same kind of semantic coloring and gradually the whole sentence or paragraph will also be permeated with a particular semantic aura. Generally, semantic prosody can be divided into three major categories:positive semantic prosody, neutral (mixed) semantic prosody and negative semantic prosody. Semantic prosody research is largely developed under the emergence of modern corpus linguistics. With the help of the corpus, a large amount of authentic language materials could be available to analyze the collocations of words, and detect the subtle semantic prosodic features of each node word, making synonym discrimination possible and more easily.The present research aims to investigate and compare the semantic prosody of the four near-synonyms rather quite, fairly and very in both native Chinese speaker’s corpus CLEC and native English speaker’s corpus COCA, choosing their common meaning "to some degree". The research uses both corpus-based and corpus-driven approach. First, build a colligation "node word+adjectives". Second, extract collocates of the four node words from the two corpora. And then calculate the MI score of each collocate. And select the significant collocates(MI score>3). The main software used is Wordsmith 5.0 and Excel 2003 to help with the calculation. Third, analyze the semantic prosodic features of these significant collocates respectively. And finally make a comparative analysis of the four node words in CLEC and COCA to find the differences and similarities of the semantic prosodic features between the output of Chinese English learners and native speakers.In terms of semantic prosodic features, the thesis has the following findings. First, Chinese EFL learners have almost mastered the dominative negative semantic prosody of rather. But they seem to overuse the negative semantic prosody and underuse the positive semantic prosody of rather than native speakers. Second, Chinese EFL learners can properly use the semantic prosody of quite. Each statistics in CLEC is approximate to that in COCA. And quite demonstrates positive semantic prosody in both corpora. Third, the problem of Chinese EFL learners overusing the positive semantic prosody of fairly is serious, and there is even no negative adjective collocates of fairly in CLEC. Last, as for very, Chinese EFL learners seem to overuse the negative semantic prosody and underuse the neutral semantic prosody of very compared with native speakers. In terms of the collocates of the four node words, the data indicate that the Chinese EFL learners tend to use some uncommon and Inter-language collocation of all the four node words, compared with the native speakers. The most frequently used collocates in COCA don’t often rank top in CLEC and the most frequently used collocates are quite different in the two corpora.At last, the potential reasons that have caused the differences are explored, such as traditional teaching method, mother-tongue interference and so on. Based on the findings, some suggestions in teaching and learning a foreign language, dictionary compiling have also been presented. To sum up, the corpus-based research of semantic prosody is significant in promoting English vocabulary teaching and acquisition, especially in synonym discrimination. |
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