A Study On The Semantic Prosody In Chinese Learners' English From A Conceptual Transfer Perspective

Semantic prosody is a newborn linguistic term which reflects the language users' attitudes in a specific situation,towards certain things.Besides,conceptual transfer is a very important issue yet new perspective in Second Language Acquisition(SLA).To study the semantic prosody in learners' interlanguage from the perspective of conceptual transfer can not only reveal the invisible prosodic features in learners' interlanguage account for the prosodic errors in learners' English from the cognitive level.This thesis reports a research that examines the relationship between the English lexical learning and conceptual transfer,with learners' prosodic errors of two verbs as it's pointcut.Based on the sub-corpus of the Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(sub-TECCL)and the written part of the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA).I carry out a contrastive interlanguage analysis on the semantic prosodies of allow and persist in Chinese learners' English from the perspective of conceptual transfer by addressing the following three questions: 1.What are the prosodic features of allow and persist in the native English? 2.What are the main prosodic errors in Chinese learners' English? 3.And what's the relation between conceptual transfer and these prosodic errors?Based on the two corpora,I first identify the prosodic errors in Chinese learners' English,and then compare the semantic prosody between the corresponding English and Chinese words to verity the rationality of conceptual transfer.The research results indicate that conceptual transfer does affect learners' lexical learning of a second language.Therefore,when learning a new English word,Chinese students should pay more attention to the features of the conceptual systems and then make corresponding restructuring and adjustment of their previous conceptual structure of their mother language to reduce errors caused by conceptual transfer.