A Corpus-based Comparative Study On Semantic Prosody Of Near-synonyms In COCA And CLEC

Synonyms play a prominent role in English vocabulary,and their importance can't be ignored.For a long time,synonym discrimination is a difficult point to break through in English vocabulary learning,and it is also an essential point.Semantic prosody,as a new perspective of semantic research,provides a scientific,reasonable and effective way to distinguish synonyms.Generally speaking,semantic prosody is grouped into three categories: positive,negative and neutral.The present corpus-based study was designed to select a pair of synonymous adverbs as the research object,including quite,rather and very picked up from COCA and CLEC.Combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,this paper aims to address the three perplexing questions: 1)What are the semantic prosodic characteristics of quite,rather and very in CLEC and COCA respectively? 2)What are the similarities and differences of the uses of the three words in the two corpora? 3)What are the possible causes of overuse/underuse of quite,rather and very by Chinese English learners?The present study mainly consists of three procedures.First,the significant adjective collocates(MI?3)with a span of 0 to left and 1to right are retrieved and are classified into positive,negative,and neutral prosody.Then some concordance lines of the three node words within the colligation “node word+ADJ” are extracted to analyse the semantic prosody of the node words in specific context.Secondly,the semantic prosodic features of these significant collocates in COCA and CLEC are analyzed comparatively with the purpose of making an comparison between the Chinese English learners and native English speakers with many similarities and differences in terms of semantic prosody of these three synonyms.At last,the possible reasons that cause the difference would be given.Based on the analysis,this study has the following findings.1)the Chinese EFL learners in question used the dominate negative semantic prosody of rather nearly as the native speakers,but they overused the negative semantic prosody and underused the positive semantic prosody of rather in comparison with the native speakers.2)the Chinese EFL learners have a good command of the semantic prosody of quite.Each statistics in CLEC is nearly equal to that in COCA.And quite demonstrates positive semantic prosody in both corpora.3)the Chinese EFL learners overused the negative semantic prosody and underused the neutral semantic prosody of very compared with the native speakers.4)in terms of the collocates of the three node words,the statistic analysis shows that the collocates most frequently used by the native speakers in COCA were not frequently used by the Chinese EFL learners in CLEC,and the Chinese EFL learners used some in-idiomatic and inter-language collocates of all the three node words compared with the native speakers.Based on these findings,this study explores the potential reasons that have caused the differences such as traditional teaching method,mother-tongue interference and provides some suggestions for foreign language teaching and learning as well as dictionary compiling.