A Corpus-based Study On Collocation And Semantic Prosody Of Synonymous Phrases By Chinese English Learners

Vocabulary teaching is an important part of foreign language teaching.For Chinese English learners,the discrimination of synonyms and synonymous phrases has always been a key but difficult point.In recent years,with the rise of corpus linguistics,many scholars have begun to use corpus to study Chinese English learners’ acquisition of English synonyms or synonymous phrases in terms of collocation and semantic prosody.With the help of corpus,it can be clearly understood that how native speakers and Chinese learners use individual words or phrases by means of concordance tools and data statistics,which provides the possibility of identifying synonyms or phrases and promotes vocabulary teaching to a certain extent.The approach of corpus-based contrastive analysis is adopted in this study.The Chinese English Learner Corpus(CLEC)is chosen as the learners’ corpus.The Frown & Flob corpus,which is a combination of American English Corpus Frown and British English Corpus Flob,is used as the reference corpus.By analyzing the collocation and semantic prosody features of the five synonymous phrases of because of,thanks to,due to,owing to and as a result of in CLEC and Frown & Flob,this study aims to find the similarities and differences in the use of English synonymous phrases between Chinese learners and native speakers and explore the reasons for their differences.This study contains three research questions: 1)What are the using features of the five synonymous phrases of because of,thanks to,due to,owing to and as a result of in CLEC in terms of collocation? 2)What are the using features of the five synonymous phrases of because of,thanks to,due to,owing to and as a result of in CLEC in terms of semantic prosody? 3)Why do Chinese English learners use the five synonymous phrases differently from native English speakers?It turns out that Chinese English learners show great differences in the use of these synonymous phrases.The differences are mainly reflected in the number of collocations used by learners,the less use of thanks to’s negative semantic prosody and the misuse of due to’s and owing to’s semantic prosody.In addition,many synonymous phrases co-occur with the same significant collocates in learners’ English.This study holds that there are three reasons for the differences: first,learners are disturbed by their mother tongue collocation habits;second,learners lack the knowledge of synonymous phrases’ collocation and semanticprosody;third,learners are influenced by their vocabulary learning strategies and they tend to adopt avoidance strategies.In view of the reasons for the differences,this study puts forward some suggestions for English vocabulary teaching: introducing corpus and concordance tools in teaching to provide students with high-quality and sufficient learning materials;introducing the knowledge of collocation and semantic prosody in teaching,and cultivating students’ semantic prosody awareness.