A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Semantic Prosody Of English Synonyms

Semantic prosody is a special language phenomenon that the node word frequently co-occurs with some lexical items and is inevitably imbued with the same semantic features,hence forming a special semantic atmosphere.Synonyms,playing a crucial role in the English vocabulary,are regarded as one of the most difficult aspects in vocabulary teaching and learning.As a new perspective to explore in-depth knowledge of vocabularies,corpus-based studies on semantic prosody underpin the foundation for further synonym discriminations.Adopting Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA),this study selects Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC)&Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SWECCL)as the Chinese EFL learner corpus while Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)as the native English speaker corpus.In terms of frequency,collocation features and semantic prosody,motive/motivation,provide/supply,fairly/rather are analyzed.The four research questions are as follows:(1)What are the differences of the synonyms in terms of frequency between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers?(2)What are the differences of the synonyms in terms of collocation features between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers?(3)What are the differences of the synonyms in terms of semantic prosody between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers?(4)What are the possible reasons leading to the misuses of synonyms in terms of semantic prosody?The exact procedures to perform the study are as follows.First,retrieve relative concordances of three synonymous pairs in two corpora via COCA on-line search engine and AntConc 3.2.1w,hence to calculate the frequency of each node word.Second,set the minimal MI(MI>3)score to collect significant collocates,based on which semantic sets are generated accordingly.Lastly,establish semantic prosody manually annotated by inspecting the expanding contexts of significant collocates.Through a corpus-based analysis,the findings are as follows.First,except that supply is overused,other node words are underused by learners.Second,motive tends to co-occur with collocates related to illegal activities while motivation is apt to appear with collocates involved with normal or beneficial activities.provide tends to appear with abstract nouns dealing with academic information while supply is inclined to co-occur with concrete nouns in relation to life necessities.fairly is likely to collocate with adjectives showing continuity and certainty while rather is more possibly to collocate with adjectives describing abnormal phenomena.Chinese EFL learners are liable to neglect and confuse the different semantic sets of synonyms.Third,in native English,motivation has mixed semantic prosody while motive owns negative semantic prosody.Learners overuse negative semantic prosody of motivation and positive semantic prosody of motive.In native English,provide displays positive semantic prosody while supply shows mixed semantic prosody.Chinese EFL learners overuse positive semantic prosody of supply but neglect its negative semantic prosody.In native English,fairly has positive semantic prosody while rather presents negative semantic prosody.Learners overuse positive semantic prosody of fairly.Finally,the possible reasons leading to misuses of synonyms in terms of semantic prosody are discussed from the perspectives of language transfer,traditional learning and teaching as well as pragmatic awareness.The findings shed some light on language learning,teaching and lexicography.First,semantic prosody needs to be introduced into practical teaching to cultivate the awareness.Second,by observing semantic prosody,students gain a new approach to further discriminate synonyms.Lastly,corpus-based studies on semantic prosody furnish lexicography with more abundant and reliable information.