A Corpus-based Study On Semantic Prosody Of English-Chinese Dictionary Entries

Semantic prosody plays a crucial role in the operation of effective communication and has attracted intensifying attention from linguistic researchers at home and abroad. The studies on semantic prosody are of great significance in various aspects, such as dictionary compilation, language teaching, pragmatics and translation etc.However, in some English-Chinese dictionaries, the semantic prosody of English node words is not explicitly reflected in their Chinese annotations. Since the English-Chinese dictionaries are mainly designed for English beginning learners, the lack in semantic prosody information may cause confusion and affect learning efficiency. Additionally, the semantic prosody of native language is deeply imbued and will be transferred unconsciously to the node word to be learned. Hence, the consistency of semantic prosody of English node words and Chinese annotations is of great importance in English-Chinese dictionaries.In this regard, this thesis intends to conduct a corpus-based study on semantic prosody of English-Chinese dictionary entries, with case studies of verbs of appearance. Guided with the theories forwarded by John Sinclair and the approaches proposed by Wei Naixing, this thesis applies the combination of data-based approach and data-driven approach, with data collected from the British National Corpus and corpus in Center for Chinese Linguistics, to present a qualitative and quantitative analysis on entries in Macmillan English-Chinese Dictionary for Advanced Learners.This thesis discovers that there does exist the discrepancy between English node words and Chinese annotations in terms of semantic prosody and that the semantic prosody of English node words is consistent with that shown in the examples in entries. In the end, the author offers several suggestions for dictionary compilation and language pedagogy.