A Corpus-based Study On The Semantic Prosody Of English Logical Resultative Formulas In Maritime English

Semantic prosody is the attitudinal meaning of node word and corresponding collocation from the perspective of pragmatics,focusing on the connection between meaning and use.Maritime English plays a vital part in the shipping industries and as English for science and technology,the causal/resultative relation expression is of great significance.The research objects of the study are seven English logical resultative formulas(so that,due to,[result]from,because of,[result]in,caused by,[lead]to)in the Maritime English Corpus constructed by Dalian Maritime University.On the basis of the meaning-shift unit theory,concordance lines for those seven English logical resultative formulas are extracted to summarize the semantic prosody,meaning-shift unit and variant of each English logical resultative formula.The study mainly focuses on the semantic prosodies and meaning-shift unit of seven English logical resultative formulas in Maritime English,meanwhile,the connection between semantic prosodies and meaning-shift units are explored.The study attempts to make the qualitative and quantitative analysis on the meaning-shift unit and semantic relations.By means of collocations,colligations,and semantic preference,the meaning-shift unit and variant of English logical resultative formulas are concluded.The results show that caused by and[lead]to display the negative semantic prosody and neutral semantic prosody,so that,due to,[result]from,[result]in display the neutral semantic prosody while because of shows the mixed prosody;when the semantic prosody transfers from one to another,the meaning-shift unit of seven English logical resultative formulas is accordingly changed,accompanied by co-selection pattern changing,conversely,the semantic prosody also changes along with the change of co-selection pattern.By means of the new analysis model of semantic prosody---meaning-shift unit,the study focuses on the core role of the change of co-selection pattern and meaning.Co-selection pattern is the format of the meaning,thus the change of meaning in the text leads to the change of co-selection pattern and the semantic prosody is the determining factor.Meanwhile,the study is conducive to the learning and understanding of the semantic prosody in Maritime English from a new perspective.