A Prototype Theory-based Comparative Study On The Semantic Prosody Of General Color Terms In English And Chinese

With the fast development of corpus linguistics,semantic prosodies have become the focus of linguistics.The definition of semantic prosody is firstly put forward by Sinclair in 1991,and he defines semantic prosody as a certain semantic environment shown by a tendency of words and phrases influenced by its collocations.In this research,four English general color terms of white,red,green and blue,and four Chinese general color terms of?(bai),?(hong),?(lv)and?(lan)are chosen to be studied on the basis of the English corpus of BNC(British National Corpus)and the Chinese corpus of CCL online(corpus established by Center for Chinese Linguistics of PKU)to analyze the semantic prosodies.Different from the classical classifications of semantic prosodies including positive,negative and neutral semantic prosody,semantic prosodies in this thesis are subdivided according to different areas such as policy,economy,culture etc.and their significant collocates,which improves and enriches the previous studies.For example,significant collocates of“?(bai)”using in the area of culture such as“??(baishi)”and“??(baiche)”always co-occur with phrases such as“??(sangshi)”,“??(siren)”,“??(guhui)”,“??(binzang)”in CCL,so the semantic prosody is“death”when the“?(bai)”is used in the area of culture?There are three steps in this research: first,all general color terms in English and Chines are retrieved as nodes in both BNC and CCL,and then “white/?(bai)”,“red/?(hong)”,“green/?(lv)” and “blue/?(lan)” are selected according to the frequencies.Next,the top 30 significant collocates(MI > 3)with their mutual information are selected as the research objects through BNC and Python.Finally,the semantic prosodies are subdivided according to significant collocates and differences and similarities of them in Chinese and English are analyzed based on prototype theory.This study mainly discusses the following three questions: What are the significant collocates of general color terms in English and Chinese? What are the similarities and differences in the general color terms' semantic prosodies between English and Chinese? What are the prototypes responsible for the similarities and differences in the semantic prosodies of general color terms? The findings of the research are as the following: first,significant collocates of general color terms in English and Chinese are not exactly the same,and only some of them are the same.Second,the semantic prosodies of general color terms are different with different significant collocates in English and Chinese.Third,the extension of semantic prosodies is mainly realized through metaphor and metonymy and it is influenced by different factors such as economy,policy and culture.