On Semantic Prosody Of Corresponding Units In C-E Dictionary

Cultural words,as the carriers of Chinese culture,play a key role in its inheritance and development.Their accuracy of definition has an essential importance to the spread of traditional Chinese culture.Chinese-English dictionaries are important reference books for second language learners,whose accuracy of definitions will inevitably affect the cognition and construction of Chinese culture by dictionary users.In order to meet the needs of the dictionary users and describe the words more comprehensively,this thesis adopts the corpus-driven method to get a mount of language facts and then generalizes some features of semantic prosody based on the research paradigm of three-dimensional integration of dictionaries,users and lexicographers.Taking disyllabic Confucian adjectives as research subjects,this thesis is conducted and guided by the theory of co-selection.Combined with the evaluation theory,Model of Extended Unit of Meaning will be supplemented and perfected.Based on that,a new model called“MEUM~+”can be established and will be taken as the framework for the present study.Two corpus will be employed to form a comparative corpus,including Modern Chinese Corpus:a sublibrary of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU:and American Contemporary English Corpus.Selecting three authoritative English dictionaries from Big Five as references,this thesis probes into semantic prosodies of disyllabic Confucian adjectives in two Chinese-English dictionaries,and then generalizes their shortcomings.In order to establish equal corresponding units in semantics and functions,some suggestions will be provided for dictionary compilation:to perfect or optimize annotation,or to find new equivalents with the help of BCC bilingual corpus of Beijing Language and Culture University Corpus Center.According to the research,some results can be obtained as follows:Firstly,types of semantic prosody of disyllabic Confucian adjectives keep highly consistent with those of connotative polarity in most cases.Secondly,descriptions of disyllabic Confucian adjectives are seriously inadequate at the level of semantic prosody in two Chinese-English dictionaries,and there is no any obvious annotations to semantic prosody.Thirdly,there exist some problems in semantic prosody,such as non-correspondence in semantic preference,heterogeneity in semantic prosody,and conflict in semantic prosody.This thesis not only theoretically complements Model of Extended Unit of Meaning and integrates the fruits of semantic prosody into dictionary compilation,but also practically dedicates to the establishment of bilingual correspondence units in meanings and functions.In addition,this thesis both expands the vision of dictionary research,and deepens the study of definition in bilingual dictionaries.Meanwhile,it is also helpful for lexicographers to grasp the meaning and functional usage of a word in a more comprehensive and systematic way.