A Comparative Study On Semantic Prosody Of RESULTS Synonyms Between Chinese English Learners And Native English Speakers

This thesis aims to make a comparative study of the collocation behaviors of a group of RESULTS synonymous nouns,exploring the characteristics of Chinese English learners' language use and the factors influencing the formation of such characteristics.This thesis takes a group of RESULTS synonyms EFFECT,RESULT,CONSEQUENCE and OUTCOME as the research objects,and takes the data in TECCL and BNC as the research data.Based on the Extended Meaning Unit Model,this thesis uses Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA)to explore the collocation behaviors of RESULTS synonyms in both Chinese and English corpora.The results are compared and analyzed to explore the similarities and differences in the use of synonyms between Chinese English learners and native English speakers.The results show that Chinese English learners and native English speakers have similarities in the use of RESULTS synonyms,but it's more of a difference.The node word EFFECT has three common collocates(greenhouse,environment and cause)in TECCL and BNC.greenhouse has the semantic preference of “trend of climate warming”,and cause is usually used to mean “lead to something bad”,which makes EFFECT has a relatively negative semantic prosody in both corpora.However,the collocates that share positive meaning in TECCL and the collocates that indicate the meaning of “immediate” and “similar” in BNC are not found in the comparative corpus.The node word RESULT shows a large difference in TECCL and BNC.Except for the collocates that express the meaning of “final”(TECCL: final;BNC: net,end),there are no obvious similarities between other significant collocates in TECCL and BNC.There is a set of collocates related to“study” in TECCL and a group of obvious favorable collocates,while the significant collocates in BNC mostly convey the semantic preference of “change”.And the node word RESULT in both corpora has a clear neutral semantic prosody.The only similarity between the significant collocates in TECCL and BNC with CONSEQUENCE as a node word is that there is a common collocate cause,which isused to mean “lead to something bad”.Significant collocates in TECCL have the semantic preference of “do something by mistake” and “awful”.These two unfavorable preference make CONSEQUENCE have a significant negative semantic prosody,while most of the collocates in BNC have no clear favorable or unfavorable preference,which makes CONSEQUENCE show a neutral semantic prosody.Significant collocates with OUTCOME as a node word in both corpora have the similar collocates that express the meaning of “satisfactory”.The difference lies in that the collocates in TECCL denote the meaning of “success”,“violence” and“disappoint”,while the semantic preference in BNC is relatively simple with only a set of collocates representing the meaning of “competition”.The ambiguity of semantic preference leads to the ambiguity of semantic prosody of OUTCOME in BNC.On the contrary,the node word in TECCL shows a clear positive semantic prosody.It can be seen that although Chinese English learners and native English speakers have similarities in the use of collocation semantic preference and semantic prosody,the differences are still obvious.The misuse of RESULTS synonyms by Chinese English learners results from the misunderstanding of them.In terms of the use of colligation,Chinese English learners and native English speakers have roughly the same colligation in both corpora,but there are subtle differences in similarities.First,the frequency of the same grammatical structure is different in different corpora.This phenomenon is especially reflected in the excessive use of the phrase as a result by Chinese English learners.Secondly,for the same colligation,native English speakers are more diverse in its expression,while Chinese English learners have a relatively single expression.