A Corpus-based Study On The Semantic Prosody Of Accomplishment Verbs In EFL Learners' C-E Translation

Semantic prosody,as an important research topic in corpus linguistics,offers a new perspective to the study of lexical behavior,revealing the internal semantic relationship of word collocation.Corpus-based study of collocation and semantic prosody can help learners get the essence of language,and acquire authentic expressions of native speakers.Semantic prosody plays a significant role in foreign language teaching,especially for lexical teaching.The British National Corpus(BNC)and a self-built corpus of Chinese-English translations by EFL(English as a Foreign Language)learners are employed in this research.Translated texts by juniors and seniors who major in English are collected in the Learner Translation Corpus(LTC).By means of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,the thesis makes contrastive analysis on the differences of four accomplishment verbs including END,FINISH,COMPLETE and TERMINATE between English of native speakers and English of Chinese EFL learners,aiming to figure out the collocational behaviors and semantic prosodic features of the four nodes in Chinese EFL learners' C-E translation.The main findings are as follows.Firstly,for the frequency of the nodes,END is the highest of the four,with COMPLETE and FINISH similar in frequency,while TERMINATE is used much less in BNC.However,the frequency of FINISH is the highest in LTC,followed by COMPLETE and TERMINATE,and END has the lowest frequency.Secondly,regarding collocational behaviors of the nodes,Chinese EFL learners are able to acquire some typical collocations,but there are some interlanguage collocations and untypical collocations in learners' translation as well.Comparatively speaking,the interlanguage collocations are more common in the usage of END and FINISH,and the untypical collocations appear more often in the usage of END and TERMINATE,while the phenomena of interlanguage collocations as well as untypical collocations of COMPLETE appear relatively less in LTC.Thirdly,for prosodic features of the nodes,Chinese EFL learners have some difficulties in acquiring the exact semantic prosody of some items.The prosodic features of END in the two corpora differ greatly,which will lead to pragmatic errors and prosodic clashes in translation.Comparing learner translations with native English,it can be perceived that Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse the positive prosody of FINISH and negative prosody of COMPLETE,which breaches the semantic harmony to some extent.As for the prosodic feature of TERMINATE,it is almost the same in the two corpora.Based on the above findings,further analysis and implications are made in this thesis from two aspects,involving students' ability of vocabulary application and transfer competence in translation.The lexical competence of Chinese EFL learners will influencetheir language performance,and it can be detected that learners are more inclined to use words and expressions that they are familiar with,so teachers should introduce the knowledge of word collocation in translation practice and develop students' awareness of semantic prosody as well.Besides,teachers should attach great importance to students' thinking transference in translation,and help learners to achieve automatic transformation between source language and target language so as to avoid unidiomatic expressions.