A Corpus-Based Study Of Cultural Keywords' Collocational Behaviour And Ideological Implications

The present study aims to explore the ideological implications of cultural key words in the social context of China, by investigating collocational behaviour of the Cultural Keywords in China English. It is conducted in the methodology that combines both the quantitative approach of Corpus Linguistics and the qualitative one of Critical Discourse Analysis. The data for this research is drawn from CENAC (China English News Article Corpus). Resorted to the previous related studies and their significance of occurrence in the corpus, the sets of the Cultural Keywords are selected for investigation, which include: FAMILY, LIFE, CULTURE, and WORK. Frequency of occurrence, collocations, and concordances of the Cultural Keywords are closely observed. On the basis of the semantic fields of recurrent collocations, we identify the semantic preference and semantic prosody of these Keywords, and the findings in China English are also compared with those in British English in Stubbs'(1996) study.The general tendencies of the collocational behaviour of the Cultural Keywords revealed in the present investigation include that: 1. the recurrence of semantically-related collocates signals the semantic preference of the Keywords; 2. it is the semantic preference of the collocations, instead of individual node words, that helps build up the semantic prosody of the Keywords; 3. the factors that influence the semantic prosody are diversified and interwoven; and 4. the semantic prosody of the Cultural Keywords tends to be a complex, so that the positive-negative division may be oversimplified for the social-cultural context in reality.By examining the collocational behaviors of the four sets of the Cultural Keywords in a detailed manner, we have obtained the findings as follows:1. The semantic set of FAMILY tends to have a mixed semantic prosody; the Keyword FAMILY is closely related with the society, while HOME is associated with the emotion;2. The semantic set of LIFE shows a strong tendency to be unfavourable in its prosody, since both of the word forms, life and living, incline to imply the negative evaluation. In addition, the collocational patterning of living provides the evidence for Sinclair's (1991) idiom principle, and supports the point that units of meaning are phrases, rather than isolated words, and thus semantic prosody belongs to the phrases.3. In general, the semantic set of CULTURE tends to be in positive semantic prosody, except for the complicated behaviour of the Keyword WESTERN. The keywords CULTURE, HISTORY and TRADITION are obviously favourable in its implication. WESTERN tends to have a mixed prosody, yet on the whole it has a higher probability to be in positive connotations. The intricate tendency serves to signal the Chinese changing attitude and value judgment towards the West. It seems that the hostility to the Western cultures and concepts is gradually transforming to a more tolerant and comprehensive attitude, while the trend of Westernization is being resisted.4. The majority of the Keywords in the semantic set of WORK show a strong tendency to have a negative semantic prosody, with the only exception of CAREER. Particularly, it is worth noticing that the collocational patterns of Keywords WORK and LAOUR indicate the dramatic social transformation undergoing in China.