A Corpus-based Study Of The Semantic Prosody Of The Verbs Of Existence In The Specialized Texts

Semantic prosody is an important object of study in the contemporary corpus linguistics. The semantic has been widely applied into lexicography, translation and language teaching. However, semantic prosody is rarely applied into the news discourse and the domestic and foreign study of semantic prosody in the news discourse is rarely little. The thesis explores the semantic prosody of the verbs of existence in the news discourse with the corpus-based approach. The aim of the thesis is to show the collocation and colligation features of the verbs of existence and their semantic prosody.The study is based on the sub-corpus ‘newspaper’ of BNC(British National Corpus) which consists of 100 million words. This thesis adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches to study semantic prosody of the verbs of existence in the news discourse. Three research questions are discussed in this thesis: 1) What is distribution of the verbs of existence in the English news discourse? 2) What are the collocations and colligations of the verbs of existence in the English news discourse? 3) What is the semantic prosody of the verbs of existence in the English news discourse?The study is divided into three steps: firstly, the distribution of the verbs of existence in the English news discourse is gotten according to BNC’s own online retrieval function. The top five frequency verbs are this thesis’ s objectives and they are LIVE, STAY, REMAIN, WAIT, SURVIVE. Secondly, the collocation and colligation features of the verbs of existence are gotten by analyzing their concordance lines. Finally, the semantic prosody of the verbs of existence in the news discourse is gotten according to their collocation and colligation featuresThe study shows the semantic features of the verbs of existence’ colligation and collocates in the news discourse. Verbs of existence’ semantic prosody can be gotten analyzing their collocational behavior. This group of words’ semantic is similar, but they have different semantic prosody. STAY has positive semantic prosody, and LIVE, WAIT and SURVIVE have neutral semantic prosody, REMAIN has negative semantic prosody. Semantic prosody of verbs of existence is widely used in the news discourse. Language users transmit their attitudes by the semantic prosody according to their language sense.According to the study of semantic prosody of verbs of existence in the news discourse, the readers can understand semantic prosody of this group of verbs in the news discourse and the real attitudes expressed by news reporter.