A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On The Semantic Prosody Of The Causative Verbs In English And Chinese

The phenomenon of semantic prosody has attracted increasing attention in recent linguistic studies. It was first noticed by Sinclair who devoted himself in corpus linguistics and later put forward by Louw formally, who defined semantic prosody as "consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates". Since then corpus-based study on the semantic prosody of causative verbs has been a hot topic in corpus linguistics. The present study is aimed at making a detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between the semantic prosodies of English and Chinese causative verbs. Based on the contrastive study, this thesis further discusses its application in English teaching and translation.In this study, the semantic prosody of the five English causative verbs cause, result in/from, arouse, bring about and lead to and the five major Chinese causative verbs致使,导致,促使,带来and产生are chosen to be examined on the basis of the Brown family corpora (namely, BROWN, LOB, FROWN, FLOB, CROWN, CLOB) and comparable Chinese corpora LCMC and ZCTC. With the aid of corpus tool Antconc, the thesis makes a detailed exploration of the concordances of each node word, then goes on to analyse the semantic prosodic features of these near-synonyms in the selected corpora. The study figures out that cause has overwhelmingly negative semantic prosody, and lead to and result in/from have neutral semantic prosodies, while arouse and bring about bear positive semantic prosodies. Based on the data extracted from LCMC, the results reveal that致使and导致embody clearly negative semantic prosodies,促使shows apparently positive semantic prosody, and产生and带来tend to embody neutral semantic prosody.In order to have a close observation of Chinese English learners’acquisition of causative verbs, the thesis also explores the semantic features of English causative verbs revealed by CLEC. By contrasting the native English corpora and CLEC, the thesis investigates Chinese English learners’acquisition of English causative verbs in terms of semantic prosody. It is found that Chinese learners’English does exhibit different semantic prosodic features from the natives. The study also reveals that the differences and similarities between the causative verbs are not paid enough attention to by Chinese English learners. Furthermore, ZCTC is utilized to explore the similarities and differences between semantic prosodic features of translated and untranslated Chinese causative verbs, which aims to probe into whether translators have awareness of semantic prosody in translation. The results show that the overuse or underuse of Chinese causative verbs pervasively exist in translation. In addition, the differences of collocational behaviors between Chinese causative verbs with regard to context and genre are not fully acquired by translators.Since the contrastive study of semantic prosody at home and abroad is still at the primary stage and corpus-based contrastive studies on semantic prosody of English and Chinese causative verbs are still too few, the aim of the study is to present a systematic study of the semantic prosodies of causative verbs, which provides some practical implications for English vocabulary teaching and translation training. With regard to the previous studies, this study further proposes that in order to improve Chinese English learners’awareness of semantic prosody and enhance their mastery of collocational behaviors, the information of semantic prosody and collocation should be supplemented by adopting corpus-based teaching methods in foreign language teaching. In addition, translators should have basic awareness of semantic prosody, thus the misuse of semantic prosody or collocations in translation can be avoided.