A Comparative Study Of Semantic Prosody Of The Near Synonyms Between Chinese English Majors And Native Speakers

Since Bill Louw first officially put forward the term semantic prosody and its features in1993, and with the development of corpora and computer science, semantic prosody has become an increasingly important study subject. The direct significance of semantic prosody is opening a new approach to study lexical behaviors in language, especially the near synonyms-the key and difficult point in English vocabulary.This corpus study adopts data-driven approach and selects two groups of near synonyms:the verb group "suffer","endure" and the adjective group "amazed","shocked", which are based on the COCA and CEM with the purpose to investigate the semantic prosodic features of these two pairs of near synonyms used by Chinese English majors and native English speakers and then to conclude their similarities and differences as well as the suggestions for lexical study.First of all, the present study retrieves all the concordance lines of each node word within a fixed span in the two corpora, then extracts all the collocates and calculates their MI scores to identify the significant collocates with MI score higher than3.0. Finally, it concludes the semantic prosody features of each node word based on the analysis of significant collocates and figures out the similarities and differences in using these two groups of words between Chinese English majors and native speakers.As shown in the study, Chinese English majors exhibit similarities and differences in the use of these two groups of near synonyms compared with English native speakers. The first pair of "endure" and "suffer" displays a negative semantic prosody in COCA. Compared with native English speakers, Chinese English majors perform the same action but tend to overuse the words of neutral meaning to collocate "endure" and "suffer". In terms of the second adjective group "amazed"’and "shocked","amazed" demonstrates a mixed semantic prosody while "shocked" displays a negative semantic prosody in COCA. However, as indicated by CEM,"amazed’’and "shocked’both share a mixed semantic feature employed by Chinese English majors.At the end of this study, the author suggests that corpus study should be introduced for learners to acquire and master the typical collocation and colligation as well as semantic prosody. In addition, the knowledge of semantic prosody should be emphasized by teachers and learners in order to gain progress in accuracy and authenticity.