| In recent years, China gradually pays more attention to the development of culture.It is very important to learn what other countries think of Chinese culture, especially the United States given its important status in the world, before we take actions. When studying China's images, previous researchers often collect and analyze articles on some international mainstream newspapers manually, which, however, is time-consuming and inefficient. With the development of corpus linguistics, nowadays,increasing on-line corpora are available to conduct such researches. In this paper,Corpus of Contemporary American English(shortened as COCA hereafter in this thesis) is applied to study China's cultural image in the eyes of Americans.Based on the theories of Corpus linguistics, this research aims at finding out China's cultural image through COCA and getting to know what Americans think of China's culture through analyzing the collocations, colligations and semantic prosody of the representative Chinese cultural words. First, a survey is conducted to select words that could best represent China's culture. The participants in the present study are 162 students and they are Chinese students in Chinese major, foreigners studying in China and Chinese students of other majors. The participants are first required to rate the given words from 1 to 5 and then write down five words they think could represent China's culture. Second, after the words are selected, they are observed in COCA. The frequencies of all these words are searched and then the collocations, colligations and semantic prosody of eighteen selected words whose frequencies are above 100 are analyzed.The main findings of the present study are as follows.(1) The frequencies of words representing Chinese culture are generally low.Some of the occurrences of selected words are even less than ten in COCA. Therefore,it reflects that in general China's culture has not received much attention in America.Additionally, the frequency trend shows that most of the cultural words occurred at the highest frequency in COCA from 2000 to 2009 and the frequency falls thereafter. It indicates that China's policies do not bring enough American attention to its culture.(2) Among the selected cultural words, emerging cultures are far more less than traditional ones, which on one side reflects that China's traditional culture is very famous and still influential around the world, however on the other side indicates thatthe creativity for enduing cultures which could advance with the times lacks in China.(3) Cultural words of China's places, language and art as well as religion and belief show major negative features, which are often discussed with Chinese politics,education, environmental problems etc. These words account for half of the top 18 words. The popular Chinese cultures include Chinese skills and customs and Chinese food. However, in general, the negative SP takes the dominant place, indicating the unpopular image of Chinese culture.This thesis conducts an analysis of Chinese cultural image, a genre which is rarely researched in the field of semantic prosody, and its contributions are to provide a bridge between the corpus linguistics and the communication and international politics methods in order to study national image. In addition, it is also helpful for the government to enhance external publicity of China's image in culture. |
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