A Contrastive Study Of Semantic Prosodies Of Degree Adverbs Between Chinese English Learners And Native English Speakers

Degree adverbs play a crucial role in daily language communication. However, owing to their wide varieties and similar meanings, it is hard for language learners to really master their meanings and usages.With the aid of AntConc3.4.1w and based on the corpora of FROWN (The Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English), FLOB (The Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English) and CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus), the study aims to compare the actual use of common English degree adverbs in terms of semantic prosody between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers. The research procedures consist of two steps. First, AntConc3.4.1w is launched to extract concordance lines of the target node words in each corpus and the semantic features of the node words’ collocates are analyzed; then, the semantic prosodies of these node words are summarized and comparisons are made between the two corpora.The results indicate that there are differences as well as similarities between native English speakers and Chinese learners in their use of semantic prosody. Chinese EFL learners tend to underuse the negative semantic prosodies of fairly, highly, and totally; overuse the negative semantic prosodies of extremely; and misuse the semantic prosody of terribly. The results also show that some problems exist in Chinese learners’ use of semantic prosodies of degree adverbs, and the reasons may include their first language transfer, intralingual transfer, and the lack of information about the semantic prosody in dictionaries and textbooks.The study has some implications for English language teaching, vocabulary learning, as well as the textbook and dictionary compiling.