| The property and meaning of words are the focuses in English teaching. By searching and analyzing the high-frequency words in the Self-built Corpus and Brown Corpus, the author attempts to find out whether there are misuses of the property and the disharmony of the semantic meaning in the students' compositions or not. By observing the semantic features of the high-frequency adjectives, verbs, nouns and adverbs, the study on the semantic prosody of the high-frequency words in non-English major students is meaningful for the vocabulary teaching in future.This study aims to answer the following questions:(1) What are the high-frequency words in the students' compositions?(2) What are the similarities and differences between the semantic prosody of the selected high-frequency words in the students, compositions between the Self-built Corpus and Brown Corpus?(3) What are the problems and the possible reasons for the misuse of the selected high-frequency words in terms of semantic prosody?In order to answer the questions above, this paper collects three hundred and sixty compositions from the non-English major students in Shanxi Normal University in 2016 to construct the Self-built Corpus. The Self-built Corpus has the database capacity of 50232.Corpus Cloud is used as the search tool to generate the high-frequency words in the Self-built Corpus. Twenty high-frequency words including four adjectives, seven verbs,four nouns and five adverbs are chosen as the node words. By separately searching the Self-built Corpus and Brown Corpus in the Corpus Cloud, it is easy to get the collocations,the T-scores of the significant collocations, the concordance lines and colligations of these node words between the two corpora. After comparison, the features, differences and problems of the semantic prosody can be summarized. Furthermore, the study discusses the possible reasons for the problems of the semantic prosody, which is beneficial for inspiring further study and instruction of English words.The research results indicate that there are twelve positive semantic prosodies,seven neutral or mixed semantic prosodies, one negative semantic prosody in the Self-built Corpus. In the Brown Corpus, there are four positive semantic prosodies, three negative semantic prosodies, thirteen neutral or mixed semantic prosodies.As for the semantic prosody in the two corpora, twelve high-frequency words have the same semantic prosodies and eight high-frequency words have different semantic prosodies. The problems in the semantic prosody of the high-frequency words are the monotonous words to express the same semantic prosody and the semantic clash. The possible reasons are the limit of the number of vocabularies, the interference by the mother tongue and the lack of the awareness in terms of semantic prosody.The results of this research are beneficial for studying the features, problems and possible reasons of the semantic prosody in students' compositions. The study may provide guidance to the word instruction of semantic prosody, help the students foster the awareness of the semantic prosody and avoid the semantic clash. |
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