A Corpus-Based Investigation Of Semantic Prosody Between Chinese-English Translation Pairs

Semantic prosody as a linguistic phenomenon was first discovered by John Sinclair during his presiding of COBUILD project; however it’s Louw who first proposed the concept in his paper published in 1993. Semantic prosody refers to a connotative meaning that is formed in the process of the meaning unit being used with other meaning units. It is an attitudinal meaning which cannot be perceived by human intuition. Over more than twenty years since semantic prosody was first proposed, there appeared many corpus-based studies on semantic prosody. Semantic prosody has become an important research subject of corpus linguistics. However, most of the previous studies focus only on monolingual study of semantic prosody, cross-linguistic studies on semantic prosody are relatively few, let alone investigations of semantic prosody on Chinese-English equivalents. In this study, the author conducts a contrastive study of the semantic prosodies of three Chinese words 引起, 蔓延,显露 and their English equivalents in CCL parallel corpus, in order to verify that prima facie equivalents in different languages have differences in semantic prosody. In translation practice, semantic prosody should be taken as one of the criteria to judge cross-linguistics equivalents.The present study chooses three Chinese words as research objects from the Chinese-English parallel corpus of CCL, which are引起,蔓延,显露.Mutual correspondence measure proposed by Altenberg (1999) is used to determine the three English equivalents for the three Chinese words in the parallel corpus; two general corpora are chosen as comparable corpora, which are BNC (British National Corpus) and CCL Corpus. The translation pairs are extracted separately in BNC and CCL Corpus to calculate their semantic prosody strengths. By comparing the semantic prosodic strengths of the translation pairs in comparable corpora, it’s easy to find out the similarities and differences of Chinese-English equivalents in parallel corpus.This study verifies Sinclair’s point of view that semantic prosody is an attitudinal meaning. The realization of semantic prosody is not limited to one word. Semantic prosody spans over several meaning units. In the process of Chinese-English translation, prima facie cross-linguistic equivalents are not always true equivalents; there are differences in semantic prosody, this kind of semantic prosodic discrepancy may lead to failure in bringing out the attitudinal meaning in the original text. As a result, semantic prosody should be made an important basis in selecting translation pairs and in judging translation quality.