Usage-based Study On The Semantic Pr Osody In Chinese Collective Classifier

Classifier is widely used in Chinese language.As a grammatically obligatory element,classifier has long been one of the hot issues in linguistic studies at home and abroad.The researches have covered many aspects while few focused on the semantic prosody of Chinese classifier.Semantic prosody is firstly found and studied in English language in the 1990 s,and gradually expanded to various kinds of human languages.Therefore,it is worthwhile to search the phenomenon of semantic prosody in this Chinese unique word class—classifier.Based on the co-selection theory,this thesis takes the examples of five Chinese collective classifiers,namely pi(?),qun(?),ban(?),huo(?)and bang(?),studies whether there is semantic prosody in five collective classifiers and describes their features with the help of BCC and CCL corpus.The study aims at revealing the semantic function of collective classifier from the perspective of semantic prosody and investigating how semantic prosody affects the quality of Chinese collective classifier acquisition.This thesis mainly adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct the study.The qualitative study takes co-selection theory as its theoretical foundation.Enlightened by the model of Extended Unit of Meaning,the corpus-based study has proved that there exists semantic prosody in five collective classifiers.As for the quantitative study,a lexical semantic knowledge test and an interview were employed to investigate the role of semantic prosody in Chinese lexical acquisition.Candidates are non-native speakers who study in China and take Chinese as their second language.The findings show that(1)the study of lexis and lexical acquisition should be conducted within the model of Extended Unit of Meaning which reveals all kinds of co-selected relationships;(2)the phenomenon of semantic prosody does exist in Chinese collective classifier.The study of semantic prosody in Chinese collective classifier provides a new perspective for the study of semantic function of Chinese classifier which has a good practical significance in guiding Chinese lexical acquisition;(3)the acquisition of semantic prosody improves the accuracy of lexical expressions and enrich the depth of lexical knowledge.