A Corpus-based Study On The Semantic Prosody Of “Cao”

In promoting the development of corpus linguistics,the study of semantic prosody is becoming a new model of semantic analysis accomplished through corpus-based approach.The core point of semantic prosody is that when a lexical item frequently co-occurs with some other words,shades of meaning would transfer between them.Then the whole context will have a certain semantic aura.Usually,semantic prosody can be categorized into positive,neutral(or mixed)and negative prosody.Based on the CCL corpus,this thesis studies the Chinese character “cao” to explore the semantic prosody of it with applying two approaches.Within the data-based approach,700 concordances are randomly collected from the CCL.They are examined under six colligational structures and other two categories according to their collocation characteristic.Then their semantic preference can be learnt through data analysis and the semantic prosody of “cao” is decided.In data-driven approach,significant collocations of “cao” are calculated with the help of Antconc3.4.4w(2014)(a data processing software),and its semantic prosody is explored deeper.The study shows that “cao” carries a mixed semantic prosody and a strong inclination toward negative semantic prosody.Findings about the semantic prosody of “cao” penetrate into its seemingly neutrality and excavate the negative tendency,which could be beneficial and helpful for the teaching of Chinese as an foreign language.