A Corpus-based Study Of The Semantic Features Of Verbs Indicating "提供" In The Written Texts From Chinese English Learners

Every language involves a plenty of near synonyms, and English is no exception. To discriminate English synonyms has always been an obstacle faced by CEL (Chinese English learners). CEL usually only pay attention to the explanation of a certain word, but the collocations, colligations and semantic prosodies are overlooked. When they have to make some judgments on choosing English synonyms, the traditional way is to turn to the explanations listed in English dictionaries and choose a word subjectively. This, however, has some obvious inadequacies since the traditional dictionaries only list the basic meaning of the word without further exploration into it. Therefore, sometimes, CEL still feel confused as for which word to choose even though they have looked it up in dictionaries.This paper makes an empirical study in terms of frequencies, collocations, colligations and semantic prosodies of a group of synonyms based on the large quantities of authentic data extracted from CLEC and COCA with the aid of AntConc 3.4.3w and takes PROVIDE, OFFER and SUPPLY as node words by using the research method of quantitative and qualitative analysis.The results show that in terms of collocation, PROVIDE shares some significant collocates with OFFER and SUPPLY, however, OFFER and SUPPLY share no common significant collocates, namely, CEL believe that PROVIDE could replace OFFER and SUPPLY under certain circumstances, while OFFER and SUPPLY are not replaceable. By comparison, we find that CEL haven’t completely mastered the usage of node words, for example, collocates denoting the spiritual needs of human beings (encouragement, justification, impetus) appeared in COCA, not in CLEC. In terms of colligation, several types of colligation structures are used by CEL, such as V+N1+N2, V+N, N+V, V+N+Prep, V+Prep,V+Adj. However, misuses also exist in colligation structure. For example, V+N1+N2 is a colligation structure of PROVIDE misused by CEL. In terms of semantic prosody, all of the node words do not show negative tendency, which agrees with NES. They all present positive and mixed semantic prosodies.Through the study of this paper, we hope that a better way to discriminate English synonyms could be presented to CEL, at the same time, we could provide some implications for English teaching and learning, and dictionary compilation, and then further the development prospect of corpus linguistics.