A Semantic Prosody Study Of China's Economic Image Based On COCA

China's economy has enjoyed a rapid growth since the practice of reforms and opening-up policy. China is gaining more and more attentions from the world. Thereby, “China's image” becomes a heated topic among scholars, but those scholars' China's image studies mainly focus on content and event analyses by collecting mainstream media's reportage on China manually. Corpus-based China's image study, especially corpus-based China's economic image study is rare to see. In this paper, the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) is applied to study China's economic image in American media.Under the guidance of collocation, colligation and semantic prosody theory, the economic lexical items are taken as node words to examine the collocations, colligations and semantic prosodies in COCA. Information behind the results will be further discussed to explore how American media portray China's economic image.In this study, 18 China's economic lexical items are chosen to study China's economic image. The first type of lexical items is those collocating with China in COCA. All these words have a frequency over 100 and the MI-score is?3. The second type is China world-known brands lexical items. The third type is China's “economic symbol” lexical items, taking “Made in China” for example. The last type is the word “economic” and “economy” when they co-occur with China or Chinese in COCA.The research questions of this thesis are considered from three aspects: what the colligations of the economic lexical items are? What kind of semantic prosody is presented? What kind of economic image is portrayed in American media?The major findings of this study are as follows:(1) With the assistant of COCA and Ant Conc, it is observed that among the 18 lexical items, though some lexical items have only one typical and clear colligation, and some have two or more, two dominant types of colligation are found among these lexical items: node words + V, ADJ + node words.(2) Through the semantic grouping of collocations, it is concluded that American media portray China's economic image with three kinds of semantic prosodies: positive, negative and neutral. China's economy development and China's world-known brands related lexical items have positive and neutral semantic prosody. However, when the topic is turned to China's trade, currency and energy etc., these lexical items have an obvious negative prosody.(3) By the analysis of collocation, colligation and semantic prosody, it comes to the conclusion that American media acknowledged China's economy booming, China's reform in market and China's world-known brands. While in negative ways, they criticize China as a currency manipulator, a trade rules violator, and low-quality and unsafe goods producer. And they also accuse China of being an energy-exploiter and pollution source. To sum up, China's overall economic image enjoys a mixed comment in American media.Theoretically speaking, the discussion of the corpus-based economic image study from collocation, colligation and semantic prosody is a reflection on and a complement of the shortcomings of the existing image and social issue study pattern. In a practical sense, the interpretation of American media in critical way can help us to have a better understanding of China's economic image.