A Contrastive Study Of Semantic Preference And Semantic Prosody Of Business English And Chinese Corresponding Units Of Meaning

Corpus-driven study of corresponding units of meaning is an efficient approach of collocational analysis,semantic analysis,contextual analysis and production validity study.On the basis of the Extended Units of Meaning Model(EUM),the paper does contrastive analysis to find the similarities and differences of collocation,semantic preference and semantic prosody of business English and Chinese corresponding units of meaning,and meanwhile to reveal the indication of this study to business English vocabulary teaching and learning and business English and Chinese translation.Referring to the List of Business English Core Words(2008)and the synonym dictionary,A Learner's Thesaurus:A Dictionary of Synonyms(2014),the paper extracts three TRADE-group words,namely trade,business and market,and searches them in English-Chinese Bilingual Corpus(ECBC),Peking University.On the basis of mutual correspondence calculation,??,??and??are determined as Chinese prima facie corresponding units.In addition,the six words are taken as node words and respectively searched in the Business English Corpus(BEC),University of International Business and Economics,and the Corpus of Business Chinese(BCC),University College London,after which the paper extracts 100 concordance lines through systematic sampling and 150 content collocates with highest frequencies for every node word for later study of collocation,semantic preference and semantic prosody and contrastive analysis of their similarities and differences on the basis of quantitative statistical results.As the results show,if described from macro point of view,the three prima facie corresponding units are totally corresponding to each other in terms of semantic preference polarity and semantic prosody polarity.The predominant preference polarity is neutral and the predominant prosody polarities are neutral andpositive.As a result,they can be easily taken as de facto corresponding units.However,if described from specific point of view,the three prima facie corresponding units are partly corresponding or not corresponding to each other in terms of predominant preference and prosodic norm and thus can be partly taken as de facto corresponding units.From the above,although business English and Chinese TRADE-group words get high mutual correspondence score in parallel corpus and even present identical semantic preference and semantic prosody features from macro point of view,they are distinctive from each other in terms of specific attitudinal meaning and communicative intention.Business English TRADE-group words highly co-occur with trade mechanism collocates and they have relatively strong semantic cohesion,while business Chinese TRADE-group words highly co-occur with trade object and trade behavior collocates.Both of them deliver trade participants' desire of achieving positive trade effects and maximizing trade benefits.Meanwhile,the paper tries to find out the indication of the study to business English vocabulary teaching and learning and business English and Chinese translation.Theoretically speaking,the study is not bound by the traditional macro-description mode of EUM model and the adoption of specific description mode makes the analysis results closer to the actual use of language.Practically speaking,corpus-driven teaching method and contextual and interpersonal meaning teaching are of great significance and guidance to business English teaching.The determination of cross-language corresponding units of meaning is of great help to improve the business English translation accuracy.