A Contrastive Study Of “连” And “Even” In Constructing Sentences From Pragmatic Perspective

The term semantic prosody was first used in print by Louw(1993a) who defined it as “the consistent aura of meaning with which a lexical item is imbued by its collocates”. Since semantic prosody has the pragmatic function of expressing attitudes and evaluating events, it is helpful and important to study semantic prosodies of Chinese and English corresponding words for better grasping the usages and distinctions. This thesis takes qualitative approach to study the similarities and differences of “连” and “even” in constructing sentences.By taking the corpus-based approach and retrieving 440 authentic instances respectively from the comparable corpora MCC(Modern Chinese Corpus) and COCA(The Corpus of Contemporary American English), this thesis contrasts and concludes semantic preference, semantic prosody and context of “连” and “even” in constructing sentences.Based on the contrastive study of the data, this thesis has the following conclusion. Firstly, it is found that “ 连 ” has negative semantic prosody while the English word “even” possesses mixed semantic prosody. Secondly, positive and negative meanings of sentences with these two words usually center on the right side of the node word, and neutral or mixed meanings are indicated by the whole sentence.A special pattern “连+X+也/都+Y” is adopted on the right side of the node word “连”to convey semantic meanings. For the node word “even”, its meanings are mainly expressed with verb phrases and adjective phrases. Thirdly, for semantic preference,there are some similarities and differences in the expression of phrases collocated with “连” and “even” in the same semantic meanings. Finally, contextual similarities for the use of “连” and “even” in the sentence lie in the emphases of history andbackground knowledge so as to reinforce the expression of semantic meanings. For contextual differences, the node word “ 连 ” is adopted to underline the factors including the relationship between participants, social status, place, custom and literature to convey meanings. And for node word “even”, factors concerning the religion and condition of the topic are stressed for the same purpose.The findings of this thesis have implications in three aspects: Firstly, on the basis of analysis of “ 连 ” and “even” in the aspects of basic meanings, this thesis has extended the study of these two words to contextual meanings. Secondly, this thesis has some implications for language learning and teaching. It is found that “连” and“even” have some significant semantic preferences, which throw some light on a better understanding of these two words. Semantic prosody of these two words can be judged in real context, so teachers can take examples from corpora to help students manage them thoroughly. Finally, this thesis has some implications for the translation of cross-linguistic synonyms in Chinese and English. When choosing the equivalents,translators should take semantic prosody and context into consideration.